Luciferianism as Dark Paganism?: Discussing T. L. Othaos’ terminology of Satanism

NOTE: This was originally written about a month ago and I’ve wanted to get it out sooner, but a lot of important things came up. In the time since, I’ve reflected on Luciferianism as something that can be really anything, and the term “Luciferian” for me is basically falling out of use because of it. This article represents a discussion of just one of many ways “Luciferianism” is expressed.

Recently I stumbled onto the website of a Satanist by the name of T. L. Othaos, specifically an article discussing the terminology surrounding the broader milieu of Satanism and the Left Hand Path. This, of course, means a discussion of Luciferianism, and what it means, and I think Othaos’ discussion of what Luciferianism means is potentially an insightful one.

First, though, there is a necessary disclosure. T. L. Othaos’ project is unique, to say the least. Othaos espouses a brand of esoteric Satanism (it is my understanding that Theistic Satanism is not her preferred term) that she refers to as Tenebrous Satanism. It is called Tenebrous Satanism because it emphasizes a positive engagement with occultism and even “the supernatural”, with the aim of cultivating a positive relationship with the “Dark Gods”, or Nekalah. Of course, if you’ve ever seen the term Nekalah before, you probably know that this is the term that the Order of Nine Angles uses to refer to their pantheon of deities. Now before anyone sounds the appropriate alarm bells, Othaos seems to have an original take on the O9A brand of Satanism. It adopts the O9A pantheon and much of its theology and occult practice, but without the cullings, the encouragement of criminal behaviour or esoteric fascism/neo-Nazism that is usually a part of O9A ideology and praxis. It’s easy to think of it as an attempt to reform O9A Satanism, but it actually kind of seems like a synthetic project that builds itself on top of O9A occultism and then separates into its own unique thing. It’s definitely not something I would get into, and given the historic nature of the Order of Nine Angles I would be hard-presssed to see how an “O9A Reform” project would turn out, but evidently Othaos seems to have had some positive experiences with O9A occultism, sans the murderous fascism of course, and by her account at least worshipping the Nekalah seems to have had a positive impact on her life. If T. L. Othaos thinks that it is possible to develop an actually positive formulation of O9A Satanism, and that O9A occultism can be separated from its neo-fascist underpinnings, then on an individual level I think that she is certainly welcome to try, but I do not endorse the project.

With that disclosure out of the way, let’s get started for real.

The present discussion concerns an article written by T. L. Othaos titled “Satanist, Luciferian, and related terms”, which is basically an overview of terminology within the broader Satanist “community” as such. My focus here is on the section concerning Luciferians, and Luciferianism. It seems that Othaos accepts the term Luciferianism as a valid synonym or classification for her own practice of Tenebrous Satanism, but does not personally gravitate towards the label. Her aversion to the term, and it is a strictly personal aversion, is partially motivated by certain preconceptions of Luciferianism. Such preconceptions include the idea that Luciferians prefer a “whitewashed” Devil to the more openly adversarial Satan (though, as far as Ford is concerned, they’re practically the same archetype), and the idea of Luciferianism being separated from Satanism by its emphasis on the spiritual side being arbitrary, since her brand of LaVeyan Satanism and then Tenebrous Satanism is also highly spiritual. Another preconception involved is the idea that Luciferians believed in the objective existence of “dark” entities (demons, gods, etc.), leading her to see Luciferianism as more or less a form of Theistic Satanism (which is not an uncommon perception to this day) at a time when she was basically a LaVeyan Satanist.

I will say, in fairness to Othaos, that some Luciferians absolutely do fit the stereotype of “whitewashing the Devil”, and in a fairly ridiculous way. Michael Howard to me is a well-known example of that, and he basically helped codify the idea of Luciferian Witchcraft in Britain. Howard talks plentifully about Horned Gods, frequently identifying Lucifer with several “horned gods” (including Janicot and Odin), and discusses Cain, Lilith, and fallen angels being central figures in his Luciferian tradition, yet absolutely insists that Lucifer is not a Devil or Satan figure, instead preferring to see him as a self-sacrificial avatar of the godhead! I should wonder if anyone told Howard and other British witches that Azazel, the name of the fallen angel, was also a name used by Christian theologians such as Origen as a name for their nameless Satan. It’s such a silly thing, because even though there’s no need to identify Lucifer with Satan, much of historical Luciferian veneration of Lucifer involved seeing him as a less than fluffy being. Carl William Hansen saw Lucifer as an expression of the inner darkness of the universe, Eugen Grosche viewed him as identical to the dark god Saturn, and even within British witchcraft Lucifer’s identification with the Horned God led to chthonic associations. People can indeed take the “light” in “light-bringer” quite literally, without much thought to what the light is.

Another issue for her is ritual praxis, which for her didn’t really work and thus she found herself drawn away from it. But more to the point, it’s after this we come to how she defines Luciferianism in the present. Her summary of Luciferianism is “like Neo-Paganism, but directed toward demons instead of pagan gods.”. This summary is extrapolated from her current perception of Luciferianism, which is that it involves the veneration or worship of dark spiritual beings, whether as external intelligences, archetypes, inner energies, or what have you, that this supposed may or may not include Lucifer (which sounds strange considering the question of “how do you have Luciferianism without Lucifer?”), and that, apart from all of that and apart from some Luciferians saying they value discipline more than indulgence, Luciferianism has the same basic ethos as Satanism, in terms of individualism and anti-clerical opposition to traditional forms of religion. It is on these grounds that Othaos says that it is intelligible (here perhaps meaning valid) to refer to Tenebrous Satanism as a form of Luciferianism. She also states that it is also a form of “Dark Paganism” or even Demonolatry, though she seems to prefer the term “Dark Pagan” over the term “Luciferian” or “Demonolater”.

Having established this as the assessment of Luciferianism offered by T. L. Othaos. Let’s begin discussing what insight it might offer for how we might view Luciferianism as a whole.

Since Luciferianism is here at least potentially equated with “Dark Paganism”, let’s start by discussing what “Dark Paganism” means. Dark Paganism can seem somewhat obscure within the broader milieu of neopaganism, and it definitely doesn’t seem like reconstructionist polytheists are big fans of the idea, but from what little is available we can see that “Dark Paganism” is sort of an umbrella term for a set of approaches to Paganism that centre around the worship of “dark” gods (such as Hades, Morrigan, Cernunnos, Set, Hecate, Hel, and others). John McLoughlin defines Dark Paganism in terms of an emphasis on the “dark” portion of the light-dark polarity, the attendant emphasis that darkness is not to be confused with evil, the acceptance of “the shadow” and primary embrace of shadow work, a focus on self-expression via aesthetic darkness, and a general attunement to “darker” or more internally-focused currents of spirituality, which favour self-discovery and self-realization without the perceived focus on external morality and traditional worship found in other religious paths. Darkness in McLoughlin’s brand of Paganism is not just about a corrective aspect of “the balance”, it is a link to awareness of both the self and the sacredness of life (which, of course, is inseparable from death) and to the importance of living life to the fullest and remaining true to who you are; as I may understand it, to align yourself with the true basis of life, to the true nature in an inner and outer sense, and self-essence freely without being bound to the norms of society. The way I talk about it, it kind of sounds like Dark Paganism is an apt enough label for what I aspire to. Given the emphasis on darkness and transgression, the focus on self-expression, and the stated objectives of freeing people from social conditioning that blockades authentic, self-originating individuation, Dark Paganism can be seen as an application of the Left Hand Path within Paganism.

Othaos in her articles uses the term Dark Paganism interchangeably with Demonolatry, but this is not necessarily accurate to Demonolatry, not least since there are many Demonolaters who do not consider themselves Pagans and would reject being called Pagan. The way I see it, it is very possible to approach Demonolatry in a manner consistent with Paganism, but I think some of the theology that comes with it can’t be described as Pagan. In Stephanie Connolly’s Complete Book of Demonolatry, there’s a theology that seems to be inspired by Hermeticism in that it derives from it a pantheistic cosmos, which is to say a monotheistic cosmos in which God, or rather in this case the Egyptian god Atum, is the universe or reality itself rather than an intelligence that exists beyond it. The difference, of course, is that Satan is the identity of this pantheistic divine presence instead of God or Atum, and that the co-identity of Man and the Whole represented by Satan/Atum/God is interpreted as a form of self-worship. When it comes to Dark Paganism versus Demonolatry, I would also refer to Amaranthe Altanatum, who is a Theistic Satanist and practicing Demonolater. She points out that Demonolatry is not in itself Pagan, due to the fact that it is not a nature-based tradition, which she considers to be more definitive of at least contemporary Paganism. I’d add that, although there are plenty of modern Pagans, especially reconstructionist ones, who reject the idea of Paganism as a nature-based religion, it is possible to parse a nature-based or even somewhat “naturalistic” religious outlook from the animism that sometimes comes with polytheism and is especially integral to Heathenry in particular.

So how does all of this come back to Luciferianism? Well, Luciferianism does have some intersection with Paganism, or at least neopaganism. Fredrik Gregorius, in a section of Per Faxneld’s The Devil’s Party: Satanism in Modernity, at least tentatively argues that Luciferianism can be (theoretically) distinguished from Satanism by placing Lucifer in a more distinctly non-Christian, sometimes even neopagan, context. In this definition, Lucifer is distinguished from Satan by the consideration of Lucifer as a pagan god versus Satan as a strictly Abrahamic entity (the enemy or angel of God). This definition is met by many Luciferian groups, historical and present. Carl William Hansen identified Lucifer with the Greek god Pan, and several other Greek gods, as well as some gods from other pantheons such as the Norse gods. Eugen Grosche, while obvious playing with aspects of Gnosticism and even claiming descent from a particular set of “Gnostic” teachings, he identified Lucifer with the Roman god Saturn. Several British Luciferian witches, and those who do not call themselves Luciferians, identify Lucifer as a figure similar to the Horned God of Wicca, and link him to a litany of pre-Christian deities. Even some Wiccans believe that Lucifer is either a name for their Horned God or a sun god in the vein of Charles Leland’s Aradia. And of course, Michael W. Ford argues that Lucifer is an ancient pre-Christian archetype, and probably popularized the approach to Luciferianism built around what could be termed an adversarial take on neopaganism; or, as Amaranthe put it, “adversarial polytheism” – albeit, in Ford’s case, definitely a rather soft form of polytheism in light of its heavy reliance on the archetypal theory of deity.

It’s not universal, since there are plenty of Luciferians who can’t be counted as neopagans and instead lean much closer to Gnosticism. In such an approach, Lucifer would still basically be distinguished from Satan, but not so much as a pagan god and more as a sort of Christ-like figure, or even assuming the same role that Gnostic Christianity actually reserves for none other than Jesus Christ. In fact I’m quite worried that a more Christianized version of Gnostic Luciferianism may become an influential current of Luciferianism, if not somewhat dominant. Still, the description T. L. Othaos gives of Luciferianism as “like Neo-Paganism, but directed toward demons instead of pagan gods”, or to put another way “like Neo-Paganism but based around the Left Hand Path”, almost certainly applies to a number of historical representations of Luciferianism, and to a number of contemporary Luciferians. Thus, could Luciferianism as Dark Paganism, or a subset thereof, be valid? I suppose in some ways that depends on whether or not it’s accepted as a subset of Theistic Satanism, and what I’ve seen historically suggests to me that Luciferianism is too broad for that to be the case. I think that Luciferianism as a mode of Dark Paganism is viable as one of the different ways of being a Luciferian, and not just because Luciferianism seems to be a big tent of Left Hand Path occult movements anyway. There do in fact seem to be modern Pagans around who consider themselves Luciferians, and whose idea of what that means involves gravitating towards darker deities in the various pantheons with the aim of ritual self-empowerment, and in this sense perhaps these Luciferians can be called Dark Pagans, at least by John McLoughlin’s definition. In older online communities, many more mainstream Pagans, Neopagans, and especially Wiccans have taken to defining Luciferianism as essentially “devil worship” in opposition to Paganism, supposing that Luciferians (or more specifically practitioners of Luciferian Witchcraft) are not Pagans because they worship a Christian Devil. Such a fearful response obviously fails to account for the Latent Christianity inherent in the rejection of all things dark and devilish (even while also accepting the worship of the chthonic gods that were often feared in antiquity) or for the fact that ancient polytheists or at least magicians did worship or invoke the angels and names of God alongside the old gods in the time before Christianity had almost completely eclipsed polytheism. I mean, if Pagans could include the heavenly host of the Christian God as part of polytheistic worship and pluralism, and not be thought of as fluffy idiots even though the God of Christianity calls for the oppression of all other gods, I don’t see why the Devil and his demons should be so taboo? To say that it’s because they’re considered totally malevolent in the Christian context is, quite simply, to accept the moral claims of Christianity at face value, which is untenable so long as you also (correctly) refuse to take the claims they make for their God at face value.

I would maintain that the description of Dark Paganism is not universally applicable to all forms of Luciferianism. But if it can be practical to define Luciferianism or parts thereof as a kind of Dark Paganism, that idea has some positive potential, and I may find it very useful.

There is, however, one snag. While I was sleeping on it one day I was thinking about it, and it seems to me that the more concrete way to define Luciferianism is actually a lot more simplistic. It occurs to me that the main thing, possibly even the only thing, separating Luciferianism from Satanism is the idea that Lucifer is to be venerated as a being separated from and distinguished from the Satan or the Devil; essentially Lucifer for the Luciferians is a non-Satanic figure, and the idea that Lucifer is a Devil or a Satanic figure is just Christian slander. That would make sense of the idea of Lucifer as a Pagan god as Luciferian Pagans might suggest, but it also makes sense of the idea as a Gnostic saviour or even an appearance of Christ. But even then, a lot of Luciferians seem to venerate Lucifer as a Devil figure, even if they don’t consider that Satanic. Even older Luciferians used the terms and concepts interchangeably, such as the case with Carl William Hansen (who used Satanic imagery for fuck’s sake!) and guys like Alasdair Bob Clay-Egerton were Luciferians but he called his organisation the Luciferians Temple of Satan and defended the concept of devil worship in witchcraft from mainstream Wiccan critics. So even here, can the boundaries be said to be all that solid? Not to mention that Peter Grey in Lucifer: Princeps offers the suggestion via historical analysis that perhaps the boundaries between Lucifer and the Devil were never very strict.

Witches’ Sabbath (The Great He-Goat) by Francisco Goya (1821-1823)

Relevant articles from T. L. Othaos

T. L. Othaos’ article on Satanism and Luciferianism: https://othaos.com/satanist-luciferian-related-terms/

T. L. Othaos’ article on Tenebrous Satanism: https://othaos.com/about-tenebrous-satanism/

T. L. Othaos’ article on Teneberous Satanism vs the Order of Nine Angles: https://othaos.com/tenebrous-satanism-vs-order-of-nine-angles/

A question or two for Asenath Mason

Asenath Mason, the Luciferian Satanist author of books such as Rites of Lucifer and Draconian Ritual Book, recently came forward with a statement on her Facebook account in which she publicly defended Become A Living God, E. A. Koetting’s brand organization of which she is a contributing author. Koetting’s brand has been talked about quite bit over the last month in relation to the murders carried out by Danyal Hussein, a former BALG forum member, and the subject of BALG and its problems has been outlined in detail, but for our purposes let’s recap.

Become A Living God is a website that publishes the works of not only E. A. Koetting but also several other Left Hand Path occultists, and it is pretty notorious for the extortionate prices attached to their books as well as a host of expensive courses on how to do everything from bind women to your will, to making blood pacts with angels and demons, to creating a literal empire of wealth, to even making you fall in love with yourself, and you can pay as much $1,600 for your trouble. Koetting himself, the man behind Become A Living God, was a member of Tempel ov Blood, and probably still is, and has written books in which he advocates for human and animal sacrifice as a way to become a god, and those books are published through Become A Living God. That all came to everyone’s attention this year, and last, when Danyal Hussein murdered two women in Fryent County Park, and was found guilty in July. When the police raided Hussein’s home they discovered a blood pact with Lucifuge Rofocale which involved human sacrifice as a condition for fulfillment, and after the murder it was discovered that Hussein was, at least for a time, a member of the Become A Living God forum.

Asenath Mason, as a BALG-affiliated author, seems to rather Jane-come-lately in light of this situation, responding to outcry about Koetting a month after other BALG contributors like Stephanie Connolly and Orlee Stewart already gave their takes on the subject. Nonetheless, her response is an unambiguous defence of BALG. It reads as follows:

In the recent times I’ve watched a lot of unhealthy competition between occult authors, magicians, and their followers, as well as silly games and fights between people in occult circles. I usually stay away from such things, but sometimes you just need to say something. I was attacked in the past myself, dealing with freaks and stalkers, and I know how draining it may be, so I definitely sympathize with those who get attacked only because they’re successful in what they’re doing. There’s way too much envy and stupid games between magicians these days. I’m not going to mention any names here, but if you’ve been watching groups and pages, you’ve possibly noticed all that yourself. There have been attacks e.g. on Become A Living God lately, and since I’ve been working with them for the last several years, I just want to say that I fully support them. Over these years my experience with them was nothing but positive. I’ve never experienced there anything that wouldn’t be supportive or professional, no drama or betrayal, and I really can’t say the same about some other publishers, authors, or magicians I’ve worked with so far. I believe they’ll be fine, just like I came out successful from similar attacks in the past, while my attackers are long gone from the picture and don’t matter on the occult scene anymore. Why? Because you’re never attacked by someone who’s doing more than you or is more successful than you. It’s always triggered by envy, and those who attack you are usually no match to you. And for those who start such fights, I have just one advice – you won’t ascend spiritually if you’re a piece of sh** in your day-to-day life, so if you want to be more successful than others, focus your efforts on fixing that, instead of trying to take someone else down to your level.

In essence, Asenath Mason believes that the only people who criticize Become A Living God and E. A. Koetting are losers who are jealous of BALG and Koetting because of their success. No effort is made to address anything about Koetting’s involvement with Tempel ov Blood, let alone refute anything that has been said about it, and there is no attempt to discuss Koetting’s advocacy of human sacrifice. All Asenath Mason has to say is that the people pointing those things out are just bitter that other people are doing better than them. This represents a total lack of accountability from a BALG contributor.

As the title of this post suggests, Asenath Mason’s statement leaves me with a couple of questions for her. Does she know about how Koetting advocates for human sacrifice in his books? It seems to me to be naive to assume she doesn’t, since both Mason and Koetting are BALG authors, meaning it’s safe to assume she probably did read some of Koetting’s work and chances are came across his material on sacrifice. So then, what’s her opinion of that. And to illustrate my point, let me relay a quote from Koetting’s book Works of Darkness on the subject:

In the performance of ritual sacrifice, however, the psychological justifications and explanations flow away like life from veins, and the Black Magician is left kneeling with blood on his hands, chest, face, and soul. He once thought he understood, up until the ritual dagger which had hitherto seemed so inert plunged into the victim’s heart like a key with which a doorway to absolute Darkness was unlocked and flung open.

Traditionally, the throat of the victim is to be slit from the victim’s right to the left, and in the same motion, the dagger is to be plunged up to the hilt in its heart. This type of bloody human sacrifice can be made in other ways, however, such as immolation, hanging, asphyxiation, or any other method of ending the life of the victim, so long as the killing begins and ends within the Temple, whose walls contain the spiritual explosion long enough for the Black Magician to direct it towards his goal.

This is very literally and straigtforwardly Koetting advocating for ritually murdering people as part of the practice of black magick, a way for the black magician to cultivate esoteric power to do with as he/she wishes. This is in Koetting’s book, and more of his books as well. If Asenath Mason is familiar with Koetting’s work then I am certain she has read stuff like this, and I am not certain that she has expressed any disapproval of it. So, what does she think of this? What does she think of books that talk about how human sacrifice is a way for aspiring black magicians to cultivate the power of darkness? Does she approve of such practices? And if she doesn’t, why doesn’t she say anything? Is it just a classic case of someone from BALG defending her own? That makes sense, but then why defend them over human sacrifice? Why even be on BALG? Is the exposure and the revenue really worth defending human sacrifice books written by a guy who is probably still a Tempel ov Blood fascist?

So what does Asenath Mason really value in all this? Probably nothing.

The Esoteric Nazism of the Gnostic Church of Christ-Lucifer

After my post covering E. A. Koetting and Michael W. Ford’s ties to Tempel ov Blood and the Order of Nine Angles, I cannot help but be overcome by a sense of morbid curiosity dominated by one question: just how many more self-styled leaders in the left hand path scene are secretly part of the Order of Nine Angles family? I don’t think that many are, realistically speaking, and perhaps not many even there even know, and it’s probably not possible to grasp the true depth of the involvement of those who are actually involved. This is in part down to what the O9A call “insight roles”, a practice where members assume roles that are markedly distinct from and disassociated with their activity in the O9A, often while publicly renouncing the O9A or denying any involvement with them. The life of Christos Beest is a good example of this, where his public rejection of the O9A and conversion to Catholicism were actually, according to his memoirs, just another step in the Sinister Path which he still consciously followed, and it’s an important reason why you can’t trust that E. A. Koetting or Michael W. Ford aren’t still associated with them in some way. In that spirit, however, my curiosity recently led me to a Medium article written by an anti-fascist leftist podcast called The Empire Never Ended in which they document the infiltration of the government of Montenegro as well as the Montenegrin Orthodox Church by O9A members. It was here that I stumbled onto a bizarre and obscure occult organization called the Gnostic Church of Christ-Lucifer (a.k.a. Gnostička Crkva Hrista-Lucifera). Being as the article doesn’t cover it too much, I opted to investigate.

There’s very little information out there about the organization, but before we get into what does exist about it let’s talk about its leader, who the article discusses at length. The leader of the Gnostic Church of Christ-Lucifer is a man by the name of Nikola Poleksić, who along with his wife Mirna Nikčević is also the leader of a nexion of the Order of Nine Angles called Astral Bone Gnawers Lodge. Poleksić is also a musician, being involved in a number of rock and metal bands as well as a dark ambient project called Dark Imperivm, and as far as O9A members go he is easily the most active and prominent in Montenegro at least. He further seems to be a seasoned occultist, and quite the braggart at that, always bragging about how he spent 20 years of his life studying the works of occultists such as Franz Bardon, and he frequently uses his social media accounts to openly defend National Socialism and support Adolf Hitler (who he compares positively to Vladimir Putin). He’s definitely very deep into esoteric Nazism, being an avid reader of the literature of Savitri Devi and Tempel ov Blood in addition to simply being a supporter of National Socialism. Almost unbelievably, as of June 20th of this year Poleksić is also a deacon of the Montenegrin Orthodox Church, after somehow rapidly climbing up the ladder of the church. Of course, while he’s in the Montenegrin Orthodox Church as a deacon, he somehow still runs the Gnostic Church of Christ-Lucifer as his church, and bizarrely enough he doesn’t seem to believe there is any contradiction involved in him simultaneously embracing Christianity and Satanism. That Nikola Poleksić can operate as a card-carrying Nazi Satanist while fronting as a deacon of a Christian church is a striking example of the insight roles of the Order of Nine Angles.

With that out of the way, let’s look into the Gnostic Church of Christ-Lucifer and try to find out what they actually believe. The article mentions that, in an interview he gave with Jake Hanrahan, Poleksić described the doctrine of his church as essentially an Order of Nine Angles interpretation of Christianity (yes, as absurd as that sounds, that is what his pitch is), and states that his theology is influenced by the teachings of Savitri Devi, the infamous pioneer of Esoteric Hitlerism. That’s about as much as the article covers. Like I said before, there’s not much information about them, but a quick trip to Google leads us to their Facebook and a five-page manifesto. Their website appears to no longer be accessible, but their Facebook page seems to have been active since 2019. Nothing of theirs is in English, so I’m having to resort to Google Translate to show you anything, and to be honest it’s probably going to be pretty shit. So if any Montenegrins happen to read this, feel free to check my ass with better translations.

Anyways, on their About page we get this description:

Gnostička Crkva Hrista-Lucifera je autonomna vjerska zajednica i mistična Tradicija nastala s ciljem promovisanja jednog specifičnog teološkog i mističnog pogleda na Hrista, prirodu naše realnosti i duhovnu evoluciju čovjeka.

Our probably bad Google translation gives us the following:

The Gnostic Church of Christ-Lucifer is an autonomous religious community and a mystical Tradition created with the aim of promoting a specific theological and mystical view of Christ, the nature of our reality and the spiritual evolution of man.

That sounds supsiciously vague. If we go off of this it can look like all they’re about is basically some weird Christian mysticism that aims to facilitate the evolution of humanity through a “specific theological and mystical view of Christ”. This view of Christ is expanded upon in what seems to be their first Facebook post, mercifully translated through Facebook. The post begins with “What is the GCHL?” and contains the exact same statement as before, but the rest of it reads as follows:

Speaking in purely mythological terms, we believe that human species is enslaved by Demijurg, malevolent being, head of the cosmic race of spiritual predators in the Bible, known as ′′ Elohim ′′ (gods). For us Christ is a rebel against this spiritual tyranny of Elohim, similar to Prometheus from Greek mythology who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans. Fire is a symbol of enlightenment and immortality that this predatory race wants to deprive us. Where is Christ for us the same as Lucifer-′′ lucifer “, the one who brings freedom to man by giving him the light of Truth, being, again, like Prometheus, punished for such a ′′ crime “.

We believe that the first, true Christians were systematically persecuted and oppressed by the official Roman Church (which later divided into Orthodox and Catholic), and that the teachings about the true nature and mission of Christ were deliberately distorted. Our mission is to, among other things, put these teachings in the right context and educate people about the same.

There’s plenty that sounds like the classic, archetypal “Gnostic-Luciferian” fare about how Lucifer is the “Gnostic” saviour who seeks to bring enlightenment to humanity and is punished by the Demiurge for doing so, just that here Lucifer is identified directly with Jesus Christ, and that the “first, true Christians” presumably follow this idea and were persecuted by the Roman Church – we are left to assume that this is meant to be the “Gnostic” sects of Christianity, none of whom ever venerated Lucifer in any capacity. Here Christ and Lucifer are one and the same, a Prometheus-like figure who rebels against the Elohim and their tyranny in order to liberate mankind.

Then you look at the group’s other posts and the picture you get of their doctine gets really convoluted. There’s this post for example where Christ is Lucifer and Jehovah is Satan, but both Christ/Lucifer and Jehovah/Satan are aspects of God and divine manifestations of the polarity of opposites. So somehow God is rebelling against God in this instance. Also Christ/Lucifer is taken to be Spirit while Jehovah/Satan is taken to be Matter, and, unlike in standard “Gnostic” doctrine, both Spirit and Matter express each other through each other, which sounds to me like their way of expressing the dualism of Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy. Another post professes a faith in a Mother Earth, identified as Bafomet-Babalon which seems to be derived from Thelema, as well as a “Mother Sofia”. The same post also professes a belief in a cycle of death and rebirth and the escape from said cycle, and said escape being made possible through a “baptism of wisdom with water and spirit”. In yet another post the GCHL seems to explicitly refer to their belief system as “Luciferian Christianity”, a “syncretic religion of the New Age” that happens to be based on the “Jewish-Christian” tradition, and takes as their source material the Bible, the “Gnostic” gospels, the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Book of the Law, as well as modern science. The organization also claims to receive all people as members regardless of “racial, ethnic, national, ideological and classical affiliation”, which is somewhat laughable when you remember that it’s run by a neo-Nazi who claims that his church’s teachings are based on the work of Savitri Devi. They even claim to be a matriarchal organization.

Last year the GCHL published a 5-page manifesto outlining their beliefs. In it they describe themselves as the first official Luciferian church founded in the South Slavic area (who knows, they very well could be), as well as a Western form of Indian Bhakti Yoga. Much of the manifesto’s content is already seen in the group’s public Facebook posts, although curiously enough the section where it talks about baptism refers to a “Heretical Mass” whereas the Facebook post refers to this same ceremony as the “Jewish Mass”. It’s not at all clear what this “Heretical Mass” could be, but since we have to remember that the church is run by an O9A member, it might just as well refer to the O9A’s infamous Mass of Heresy which is essentially just a Nazi prayer for Hitler. One interesting thing to note is that, halfway into the manifesto, we see a cross and above it says “Theological Synthesis (Above Good and Evil)”. By itself it says little other than probably a no-effort Nietzsche reference, but again, since this guy is O9A, we have to keep in mind what “being above good and evil” could mean in that context, since O9A and Tempel ov Blood people like to talk about committing extremely immoral acts in order to transcend the limits of morality.

At some point the manifesto begins to discuss the Trimurti of Hinduism – the gods Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva – in the context of the GCHL’s view of cosmic struggle, and refers to each of the gods of the Trimurti in relation to time: Brahma represents “forces beyond time”, Vishnu represents “forces against time”, and Shiva represents “forces of time”. This framework is derived from Esoteric Hitlerist doctrine, specifically the work of Savitri Devi. In Devi’s worldview, the “Man in Time” is a figure who embodies destruction and exists to further the process of historical decay, the “Man Above (or Beyond) Time” is a figure who embodies creation and exists to transcend the process of historical decay, and the “Man Against Time” embodies the power of destruction used for a “life-affirming purpose”, by which is meant fighting the process of historical decay through violent and brutal means. Savitri Devi praised Adolf Hitler as the “Man Against Time”, and believed that he was an avatar of Vishnu who came to “save” humanity. Keep that in mind. The doctrine of the GCHL is essentially employing Savitri Devi’s Esoteric Nazism by framing the Trimurti gods in relation to Devi’s framework of time and decay, right down to Vishnu representing the “forces against time” and thereby embodying the purpose of the Hitlerian incarnation imagined by Devi and her followers. The document might not make any outright references to Hitler, the Nazis, the Holocaust, or anti-semitism, but if you know anything about what the Esoteric Nazis/Hitlerists believe, you’ll easily figure out that it is a work of Nazi mysticism, just that it carefully avoids explicitly pro-Nazi or anti-semitic rhetoric to hide its true intentions and hopes you won’t know better.

And, as if it’s not convoluted enough, Vishnu and Shiva are treated as identical to each other as aspects of Brahma, the creator. This would mean that the forces against time and the forces of time are one and the same, and are both aspects of the forces beyond time, and it would mean that Hitler, Genghis Khan, and the Jews are all the same thing. Which, to be honest, makes the whole thing pretty pointless. Why do the whole racial holy war that Nazis are all about if in the end all sides of that war are exactly the same?

In any case, we come to the point of the manifesto where all of this talk of Vishnu, Shiva, Brahma and the forces relating to time come back to Christ/Lucifer and Jehovah/Satan, and it’s here that we come to the other side of the esoteric anti-semitism of the GCHL’s doctrine. Christ/Lucifer is identified as fulfilling the function of Vishnu, and represents the “forces against time”. This represents Light, and Christ/Lucifer as the “preserver” acts within nature to sustain all things. Thus Lucifer is identified with Christ and Vishnu, and insofar as Christ/Lucifer is the “force against time”, he is essentially identified with Adolf Hitler. By contrast, Jehovah/Satan fulfills the function of Shiva, and represents the “forces of time”, thus representing Darkness and acting within nature to manifest through destructive phenomenon. Think carefully about where this is going. If Christ/Lucifer/Vishnu represents Light and as the “forces against time” can be identified with Hitler, then Jehovah/Satan/Shiva, insofar as he represents Darkness and the “forces of time”, meaning destruction and historical decay, would represent the Jews, who Hitler and the Nazis believed set out to destroy “Aryan” civilization. Remember also that the O9A, of which Nikola Poleksić is a card-carrying member, identifies Christianity, democracy, and basically everything they don’t like with the “Magian” epoch, which they believe to be ushered in by the Jews. Of course, the GCHL still ultimately insists that Christ/Lucifer and Jehovah/Satan are ultimately two faces of the same entity, the nameless entity called God, which I swear is just a way of conveniently skirting the implications of the esoteric conflict between an “Aryan” god of light versus a Jewish god of darkness. I mean if the “Aryan” god and the Jewish god are all the same god, why even should there be conflict between them? But I suppose if all else fails refer to the Hegelian dialectic or some version thereof.

The manifesto ends with a paragraph that can also be found on the GCHL’s Facebook page, and it outlines a doctrine of alchemistic unity of spirit and matter in which Christ/Lucifer is Spirit and Jehovah/Satan is Matter, but their union forms the “Living Soul”, the Azoth, and outlines how the GCHL’s ideal for Western civilization is for both Christ and Satan to be worshipped on the same altar as aspects of God.

The article from The Empire Never Ended brings up that the GCHL document contains many symbols that are also found on the website for the Astral Bone Gnawers Lodge, the O9A nexion led by Nikola Poleksić. If you check the article and then check out the Facebook page for Gnostička Crkva Hrista-Lucifera, you will find at least one of the images that were taken from ABG imagery, suggesting a definite link. The doctrine concerning Vishnu and “forces against time” itself presents an obvious link to the O9A’s doctrine, in that Vishnu as an avatar of Hitler dovetails harmoniously with the O9A’s doctrine of Vindex as a kind of messianic incarnation of Hitler, and the logic is more or less the same in both doctrines.

There is very little else to cover about the GCHL, but I think it is obvious what we’re dealing with here. They appear to be a kind of Esoteric Nazi form of Gnostic Christian “Luciferianism”, but they also try to appear as an open, progressive, or accepting organization, who are of the assumption that allowing gay marriage and embracing matriarchy in their organization somehow negates the presence of Nazism or fascism despite the belief in Nazi mysticism. They are very careful to avoid making explicit references to Adolf Hitler, the Holocaust, Jews, National Socialism, or any of the usual subject matter for Nazis, but they clearly believe in the Esoteric Hitlerist doctrine of the “Man Against Time”, which denotes the belief in Adolf Hitler as the physical incarnation of a divine esoteric force manifesting in a violent struggle against “historical decay”. They don’t say outright that they worship Hitler, but they do worship the “Man Against Time” nonetheless, even if you have to read between the lines to see that. And, at the end of the day, they should be treated as an O9A proxy due to the fact that their leader Nikola Poleksić is almost certainly still a member of the organization, merely moonlighting as a Christian deacon and “Gnostic” church leader. And, just as a bit of good advice, it’s probably not a good idea to get yourself involved with a guy who is not only not going to be honest with you but also probably killed someone or multiple people in order to advance within the hierarchy of the O9A.

A depiction of Jesus used by the GCHL on their social media, attributed to a man named Ahmad Sawas Najjar

Jacob McKelvy is guilty, but he still walks free

The Jacob McKelvy saga has reached what could well be its conclusion. After several delays and trial dates kicked down like a can down the road, his trial date was eventually pushed to July 1st, and this time the court setting has been met. The judge ruled that Jacob was indeed guilty of sexually assaulting a child between age of 14 and 17, but instead of being sentenced to prison it seems his penatly is listed as a probation lasting until June 30th 2031. It seems he has been given what’s known as a “deferred adjudication of guilt”, which in Texas law is basically a form of probation that allows you to keep your conviction out of criminal record (though apparently you still have to declare that status). Below are the updated records for Case 154761501010 – 3 (Sexual assault of a child aged 14-17).

The other case, aggravated sexual assault against a child under 14, was apparently dismissed in court. The reason given for this dismissal is that Jacob was convicted on another charge, namely the charge we have already discussed above.

So what this means is that Jacob was convicted, he was determined to be guilty of sexually assaulting a child in a court of law, but somehow, instead of facing incarceration for his crime, he has been given yet another chance to walk free despite literally being a child molester! A person under deferred adjudication can avoid jail or prison, and if said person completes the probation given to them then their conviction can be completely overturned. In other words, all Jacob has to do is fulfill whatever the conditions of his probation are for the next ten years and he can stay out of the big house and eventually clear his criminal record, thereby he’ll be a free man and officially a law-abiding citizen, all while still having molested a child and having gone practically unpunished. At this point the only hope that Jacob’s victims and their families have of seeing justice is if he violates his probation somehow, because if he does then the judge could revoke his probation and sentence him to prison, or alternatively if he somehow winds up dead before that happens.

I’m not under any illusion that my efforts were to have much of an effect on his actual court outcome, but I did reach out to as many people as I could to ensure awareness of his crimes would spread off the back of the hope that maybe it would ensure that he wouldn’t go free for molesting a kid. I’m guessing all of that wasn’t enough. But hey, at least we have a huge dossier on Jacob McKelvy, his crimes, and his attempt to cover his tracks, along with several other articles on Jacob McKelvy. And just for the road, I’d like to bookend this article with the mugshot I managed to get from the Harris County Sheriff’s Office. This is a redacted mugshot that was taken when he was originally arrested in 2017. I want this to serve as a very public reminder of his offense and of his criminal status as a convicted child molester, who has walked free despite that only because of Texas’ corrupt and broken justice system that allows sexual predators to roam free if their attorney can bargain with the courts sufficiently. I would hope that this and everything else I’ve compiled finds its way somehow into the hands of anyone in a position to give Jacob a job or any sort sort opportunities to form connections or establish himself as an upstanding citizen. Yes, Jacob needs to be cancelled as thoroughly as possible. I know normally that’s rather low and unfashionable these days because of how eager everyone is to talk about “cancel culture”, but the cold reality of this case is that this is the best shot anybody has at ensuring that this vile predator doesn’t get any silver lining in life that he doesn’t deserve.

Until next time, Jacob. I’m sure your next grift lies just around the corner, and when it appears I’ll expose it. You may walk free now, but if I get any scent of malfeasance and chicanery from you, then I’ll expose it, and I’ll be on your case as many times as I need to be until you finally face justice.

Jacob McKelvy’s trial has been delayed again

Well, it looks like there’s been a rather pernicious development in the Jacob McKelvy case. Remember when I mentioned in my dossier that Jacob was suppoed to be tried on March 31st but his trial got delayed to April 16th? Looks like that happened again, right before the next trial date was supposed to happen. Now the trial is set to take place on May 19th, over a month from now.

To be honest, I have no real idea what happened to make this happen. Maybe his lawyers just in the nick of time managed to bargain with the court at Harris County to delay the trial yet again. Maybe there’s been some bureaucratic screw-up. But whatever happened it means that Jacob will continue to remain out of custody, and perhaps there will be headaches for anyone involved in the trial. Apart from waiting around for a new prosecutor, and maybe scooping up any lingering new leads on Jacob and making sure word continues to spread about his antics, there’s not much that can be done except hang on tight and maybe beat the drum some more while the court keeps kicking the can down the road.

As always, continue be on the look out for any new updates on the Jacob McKelvy case.

Arbitrary definitions of Luciferianism

Taking a break from the Jacob McKelvy saga, at least until I can find some new leads (or, failing that, until Jacob’s trial begins on April 16th), I’d like to address the subject of Luciferianism again, or more specifically the way it is often defined. Often we deal in absurd attempts by Christians to categorize it as an umbrella term for everything they hate, but it is only natural that discourse between Satanism and Luciferianism leads to attempts by Satanists to create working definitions for themselves, and thus are not always successful.

Case-in-point, an apparently popular Quora user and Satanist by the name of Jason Sarasti chimes in while answering the question, “What is the difference between Luciferianism and Satanism? Would you consider these healthy religions, and why do they hate Christians so much?“. Yes, Quora questions invariably have weird titles like that. I can’t help but think of it almost like Yahoo Answers from the good old days. But let’s get into it from here.

The first reference to Luciferianism comes with the discussion of “abrahamic Luciferians” versus “neopagan Luciferians”.

First, dispel the notion that Satanism is atheistic. It isn’t necessarily. There are theistic and atheistic Satanists.

Atheistic Satanism can be divided in 2 main groups:

1. LaVeyan Satanism

2. non-LaVeyan Satanism

Theistic Satanists can likewise essentially be put in 2 groups:

1. Theistic Abrahamic Satanism

2. Neo-pagan, Occultist Satanism

Of the 4 types, only Theistic Abrahamic Satanists literally believe in Satan as he is described in the Talmud, Bible and Quran. This might be the source of the misconception that all Satanists are atheistic. Similarly, Luciferianism can be divided between atheistic strains and theistic ones, as well as between abrahamic and neopagan varieties. For the sake of clarity, I’ll talk specifically about abrahamic Luciferianism, though it should be mentioned that unlike abrahamic and neopagan Satanists, who have almost nothing ideologically in common, there is a large overlap in belief between neopagan and abrahamic luciferians, and abrahamic luciferians will often incorporate pagan images and ideas into their own practices and beliefs, and neopagan luciferians vice-versa with abrahamic ones.

Luciferianism, generally speaking, insofar as we can make concrete generalities about it, tends to be a movement that obviously speaks to the “Judeo-Christian” superstructure of Western culture, but at the same time we often prefer to situate Lucifer in the context either of some kind of “paganism” or of a certain occult belief system that is generally considered separate from Christianity. I’m not sure where the distinction between “Abrahamic” and “Neopagan” Luciferianism comes from, but it’s certainly not something you’ll hear its actual adherents talk about, especially since nearly all of them situate Luciferianism in terms of a rejection of the “Abrahamic” religions. I suppose the closest you could get would be “Gnostic Luciferianism”, and even their adherents don’t necessarily consider themselves “Abrahamists”, even if all they do is approach “Gnostic” Christianity from the perspective that Lucifer is one of the good guys involved.

Luciferianism is actually completely philosophically detached from Satanism. One can be a Luciferian and not be a Satanist, and one can be a Satanist and not be a Luciferian. And of course, one can be both or neither.

This is broadly correct.

Luciferianism is very similar to what many people think of as “Illuminati”. It revolves around the philosophy that knowledge, and the pursuit of knowledge, is a divine virtue. It specifically focuses on the Christian interpretation of myths regarding “Lucifer” (or simply the unnamed angel; Lucifer is usually a name given to a Babylonian king, but has been adopted as a name for the devil before he became Satan. For the sake of clarity I’ll call the pre-fall Satan, Lucifer). Jews of course do not believe in Lucifer in the way Christians do, and while Muslims do believe in Lucifer, their interpretation of him runs slightly heterodox to his Christian characterization (though there is overlap).

You can think of it that way, but I wouldn’t liken Luciferianism to the Illuminati as such, though Jeremy Crow has been compared to Adam Weishaupt as of late. Suffice it to say not all of us are the kind of rationalist that is implied by the comparison, and indeed there are plenty of us that take more of a “mystic” approach to our subject matter. This is in some ways a natural product of the fact that Luciferianism has always entailed a degree of engagement with occultism in various forms, with different and disassociated strands emerging from distinct milieus such as Thelema and witchcraft. What we like to talk about a lot is “gnosis”, which can mean many different things but typically denotes a form of spiritual knowledge, self-knowledge specifically, not accessible through everyday means. I present an experimental take on the subject for my part here for the purpose of demonstration.

To put it in simpler terms:

Luciferians believe that virtues relating to knowledge, wisdom and truth trump faith.

Satanists believe that the virtues of individualism, liberty and personal sovereignty trump everything.

The problem with this is that both of those statements could, in various contexts, be applied to both systems. I can’t think of a Satanist who would disagree with the idea that knowledge, wisdom, and truth supercedes the value of faith, just that they have their own beliefs about the fulfillment of the carnal self being ultimately the supreme value (if that is we’re going off of the LaVeyan defintion or something similar). Likewise, I don’t see why the Luciferian would have a problem with the particular emphasis on “individualism” (whatever that should actually mean), liberty, and personal sovereignty as core values, though we do see Peter Grey, a self-identified Luciferian, offer criticisms of ideological individualism in his work, which emerge from the synthesis of Luciferian witchcraft with anarchist political commitment.

And now we come to a series of comparisons between the two systems.

Luciferians are utopians, while Satanists are dystopians.

I have no idea where this comes from, but I have to assume it’s to do with the way the idea of the “New Luciferian Era” is sometimes talked about. A lot of Luciferians would describe in themselves a preference towards some notion of realism as opposed to some notion of utopianism, so I’m not totally sure where this comes from. I suspect it’s a product of some sort of LaVeyan distrust of Luciferianism because they see it as basically a form of “lightworking”, or something, coupled with the fact that Luciferianism, beyond the shared belief in the veneration and emulation of Lucifer for the liberating characteristics associated with him, is actually very difficult to define, you can kind of see why Satanists would feel the need to make it a matter of “they’re “lighter” than us”. Of course, when you get into Current 218, things get rather more complicated since they are Satanists who also sometimes use terms like “Luciferian” to denote concepts of theirs.

Luciferians are moral relativists. Satanists are extreme moral absolutists.

Ford tends to establish a doctrine of relativism of some sort as a basis of his Luciferian doctrine, and there certainly is a tendency among practitioners of Luciferina witchcraft to reject Wicca for its perceived moral absolutism, but again, it’s not clear that this is a basis for universal consensus on morality. I might just as well argue that Lucifer’s rebellion against Yahweh was in itself a moral mission if the central idea is that Lucifer is to rebel against tyrannous suppression of liberty and gnosis, and there is no Church or Pope of Luciferianism that can declare such a position to be illegitimate. The idea that Satanists are “extreme moral absolutists” is even more bizarre, since Anton LaVey for one thing could not be further from such a position, and nor could people like Stanislaw Przybyszewski.

Luciferians are much more tolerant of institutions, whether governmental, scholarly or religious. Satanists are vehemently anti-institutional.

Not necessarily. The Church of Satan doesn’t seem all that “vehemently anti-institutional”. In fact, they like to insist that they aren’t political at all, and apolitical people tend not to care enough to be “vehemently anti-institutional”. But even there, there are some questions to be raise. What is meant by “more tolerant of institutions”? Or for that matter, which institutions? Luciferians aren’t going to be very keen on the institution of the church, for one thing, and some of them are not even big fans of capitalism, and the same could be said of Satanists to a certain extent.

Luciferians care more about humanism. Satanists care more about libertarianism/anarchism/minarchism.

Both Luciferians and Satanists can be said to have a certain regard for humanism (in fact, Anton LaVey can be counted as a humanist), and there are times when members of both groups reject humanism as well. Both Satanists and Luciferians tend to be broadly libertarian in their views, though I have definitely seen areas in which Satanic thought lends itself to or even endorses authoritarian societal structures (such as LaVey’s programme of Pentagonal Revisionism). Peter Grey, a Luciferian, is an avowed anarchist. Furthermore, I don’t see what about humanism excludes libertarian, anarchist, or minarchist political beliefs, and if anything I would argue that humanism and libertarianism, anarchism, or minarchism are natural fits for each other, or at least they’re very much compatible, and I would say that, in many cases, one can arrive at libertarian, anarchist, or minarchist ideological views from a place of deep-seated humanist conviction. So again, I fail to see this as anything other than an arbitrary comparison.

Satanists are more hostile towards Christianity and Islam (less so Judaism it seems). Luciferians are more tolerant of Christianity and Islam and religion in general.

For the first part, no, it’s not true that Satanists are, as a rule, less hostile to Judaism, and in fact even Lucien Greaves has had a bit of an anti-Semitism problem in the past – if, I assume, “less so Judaism” is a way of hinting at a reluctance to attack Judaism on grounds of racial sensitivity. Other than that, I’ve not seen anything that indicates that Satanism is inherently less hostile to Judaism than the other “Abrahamic” religions. Generally speaking, though, what is meant by tolerant? For one thing, Luciferians are not “tolerant” of organized religion and its strictitudes in principle. For another, even Satanists would attest to tolerating the existence of Christians and Muslims, and The Satanic Temple even goes out of its way to accomodate the latter to a certain extent.

Luciferians are optimists, Satanists are pessimists.

Peter Grey’s talk of “apocalyptic witchcraft” would certainly not read as “optimistic” from my standpoint. But other than the pre-LaVeyan expressions of Satanism carrying a markedly pessimistic tone and ontology, in contrast to LaVey who seems like something of a cheery optimist next to certain existing forms of Satanism we can name, I’m not exactly seeing where he’s coming from. Luciferianism is not necessarily more “optimistic” than Satanism, and the practitioners of Luciferian withcraft are certainly not more “optimistic” than their Wiccan counterparts.

Luciferians are more likely to be left wing (from what I’ve seen), Satanists tend to be more right wing.

Luciferians are broadly libertarian, but whether that means left-wing libertarianism or right-wing libertarianism is a matter of throwing a dart for individual members and seeing what you get. Sometimes we might not fit neatly into the spectrum at all. With regards to Satanism, it is fair to say that Anton LaVey encoded a clearly right-wing ideology into his belief system, and plenty of Satanists might believe in a similar right-wing worldview, but in reality Satanists can be all over the spectrum. In fact, the earliest representatives of some notion of Satanism were in fact anarchists of the left. Stanislaw Przybyszewski was a nihilistic anarchist who got in trouble for socialist activities in his youth, August Strindberg, who briefly considered himself a Satanist, was a left-wing anarchist for much of his life, and even Arthur Desmond, who although not a Satanist was a man who LaVey lifted much of his own ideology from, was an anarchist and a socialist who participated in populist political campaigns against landowners in New Zealand and was connected with many left-wing movements and figures in Australia. There’s also a whole left-wing heritage to the Romantic Satan that, in more recent years, has been rediscovered by Satanists seeking to distance themselves from LaVeyan Social Darwinism.

Satanists are heavily predisposed to libertarianism, minarchism and anarchism. Luciferians tend to be more predisposed towards Marxism.

Both Satanism and Luciferianism are inclined towards libertarianism, and even anarchism, to varying degrees, and there is a shared heritage of spiritual libertarianism or even spiritual anarchism involved. I don’t know where the idea that Luciferians are more predisposed towards Marxism comes from. As far as I know I’m the only one who has any interest in that.

Luciferians believe that the suppression of scientific thought was the worst thing religion ever did. Satanists believe that establishing theocracy was the worst thing religion ever did.

Both Luciferians and Satanists believe that both aspects of religion are part and parcel of each other, and that this is one of the evils of organized religion. Satanists don’t like the suppression of scientific thought any more than Luciferians do, and Luciferians don’t like theocracy any more than Satanists do.

Luciferians prefer Lucifer (pre-fall) to Satan (post-fall). Satanists make less distinction between the 2.

Some Luciferians don’t much bother with the distinction, but generally it is correct that we tend to focus on Lucifer as the light-bearer figure. Some of us even go for a more “angelological” take on Lucifer, while others of us prefer a more “diabolical” take on Lucifer, and still others prefer a more “pagan” view.

Luciferians actually like Lucifer. Satanists revere Satan, but do not like him as a being.

Techincally, there are Luciferians who do not actually worship Lucifer, though as strange as it may seem this can come down to both atheistic and theistic reasons. Although a theistic Luciferian probably would actually worship Lucifer, it is also credible that a theistic Luciferian might not worship Lucifer on the grounds that Lucifer does not desire worshippers.

Luciferians don’t normally practice any rituals (unless they are neopagan luciferians). Satanists sometimes do.

A lot of this comes down to whether or not one is atheistic or not, in which case that applies both to Luciferians and Satanists to a certain extent. If a Luciferian engages with some mode of spiritual practice, then ritual practice is inevitably part of that, and that has nothing to do with any preference for neopaganism.

Luciferianism is more monolithic in terms of ideology. Satanism is much more broad and with far more interpretations.

As far as I can see, the truth is precisely the reverse of what Jason’s just said here. There is no monolithic ideology for Luciferianism, or even a monolithic tradition. Satanism has far more grounds to claim a monolithic tradition for itself, especially since LaVey has influenced the majority of modern Satanism, even his detractors. Luciferianism, on the other hand, consists of a series of disparate currents and belief systems that often developed more or less independently of each other. Luciferian witchcraft has rather little to do with the Luciferianism of Carl William Hansen or Fraternitas Saturni which preceded it, the Neo-Luciferian Church has rather little to do with Luciferian witchcraft, and Michael W. Ford’s belief system, while it engages the subject of witchcraft, doesn’t seem to cite much of the Luciferian belief systems that preceded him save for Charles Pace, preferring instead his own synthetic doctrine based on a quasi-theistic interpretation of LaVeyan Satanism built upon “Yatuikh Sorcery”.

Luciferians are mostly atheistic. The only theistic Luciferians are neo-pagans who believe in the Greco-Roman Lucifer, not the abrahamic version. Satanists are 40% atheists, 30% abrahamic, 30% pantheistic.

The believers in the Greco-Roman Lucifer are hardly the only theistic Luciferians out there. In fact, plenty of theistic Luciferians believe in a Lucifer who has extended well beyond that Greco-Roman figure, and see him as a representation of the serpent, or the wisdom of Sophia, or even Christ.

Lastly,

Luciferians specifically use Lucifer’s Christian characterization for the most part. Theistic abrahamic Satanists use interpretations of Satan’s character from Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Satanists often hybridize their versions.

The Luciferian characterization of Lucifer is more nuanced than this, since while it would not make sense without its base in Christian folklore, it is also rather clearly contextualized outside of mainline Christianity, and is often frequently positioned in the context of esoterica and “paganism”.

Jacob McKelvy’s marriage timeline contradicts his conversion narrative

There is an aspect of the Jacob McKelvy story that has been brought to my attention, and it concerns his marriage record. This is important to go over because it seems as though it relates back to the conversion narrative that Jacob has been presenting ever since he first appeared at Spring Church. You may also expect a little more content on the subject, especially since a certain someone seems to be coming down hard on my contact Barthel.

In any case, here’s the full timeline based on what Barthel has shown me.

January 15th 2010: Jacob McKelvy married his first wife, Jessica Healey, in a Mormon wedding ceremony that took place in Spring, Texas, and was officiated by David J. Bertoch. Before this marriage, however, it seems the two already had two children together, who by the time of the wedding would have been aged 5 and 7 years old.

March 16th 2015: Jessica Healey filed for divorce against Jacob McKelvy.

July 4th 2015: Michelle Thomas, the woman who would become Jacob’s next wife (now known as Michelle McKelvy, a.k.a. Morana bat Nahash), takes part in a bizarre “self-illumination” ceremony with the Greater Church of Lucifer, later recounted by Michael W. Ford, in which Michelle is instructed by Jacob to “robe” him. Michelle was likely expecting her first child with Jacob, Damon, at this time. This was while Jacob was still legally married to Jessica and not yet married to Michelle.

July 15th 2015: The divorce of Jacob McKelvy and Jessica Healey is finalized. The two were thus officially no longer married.

October 30th 2015: Damon, Michelle’s first child with Jacob, is born.

February 19th 2016: Jacob McKelvy married Michelle Thomas, now Michelle McKelvy, in a Luciferian wedding ceremony officiated by Michael W. Ford.

So, how does this come back to the conversion narrative? Everything hinges on the first part. In 2010, Jacob was married to Jessica Healey as part of a Mormon wedding ceremony. According to the conversion narrative, this shouldn’t be.

Supposedly, after leaving Christianity, Jacob went on to be initiated in multiple occult organizations. According to Middle Path Ministries, which apparently was run by Jacob McKelvy/Yaakov Nahash, as well as his Kickstarter page, Jacob was recruited by an unspecified “underground” occult organization in 2007, and over the years climbed up the ranks to sit on “a high council”, became a studied occultist and demonologist and one of the top men in the world on this subject. They also say that in 2009 Jacob went to Rome, Italy, to get initiated to the higher ranks of some unnamed “shadow organization” and placed within “the order of the 12 apostates”, which supposedly an agenda to “bring forth the New Evolution of Mankind”, and that all of this culminated in the foundation of the Greater Church of Lucifer with Michael W. Ford and Jeremy Crow.

Now, you tell me: what was someone like that doing getting married in a Mormon wedding ceremony, if apparently he not only abandoned his Mormon Christian upbringing but also converted to some kind of Left Hand Path occult belief system before the marriage even happened?

It seems pretty obvious to me that at least this aspect of the conversion narrative was complete horseshit and Jacob was definitely a Mormon the entire time where he was supposed to be in all these occult organizations that don’t exist. And as a side-note, when I try and search for “the order of the 12 apostates”, I’m led to something called the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, which is one of the governing bodies of the hierarchy of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (a.k.a. The Mormon Church), and it seems extremely unlikely that Jacob was ever a part of that body within the Church. I can’t find anything about the “order of the 12 apostates” anywhere so it seems like Jacob probably just got that name from the Quorum, but why he would want to throw his own church hierarchy under the bus just to dab on the Luciferians is beyond me. Then there’s just the fact that he had been a registered Mormon for the entire time in which he was leader of the Greater Church of Lucifer, which tells us that he probably only ever saw the GCOL as a grift to be played on whoever would fall for it. Incidentally, it seems that he may have intended to write a book about it, titled The Book of Jacob: The Story of an Occult Leader Saved by God, and started crowdfunding pages for it on Kicktraq and Kickstarter, both with the intent of raising $8,000 for the project. Why anyone needs $8,000 to write a tell-all book about being “saved” is beyond my understanding, but both pages never got any more than three backers, and never managed to raise any more than $162, and were both cancelled on March 18th 2017.

But anyways, there’s more reason if you needed it for why the conversion narrative peddled by Jacob, and the evangelical movement, of the Luciferian leader converting to Christianity was a lie.

Is Jacob McKelvy watching?

Over the last week I’ve been on the trail of Jacob McKelvy, the former leader of the Greater Church of Lucifer who has since gone on to be arrested on charges of child sexual assault and has been hiding his trail ever since he was let out of custody on bail pending a new trial. I have published two blog posts on the subject, each of them elaborating the case and the events following it, compiling the evidence connecting everything together. But over this time something strange has been happening in relation to the Facebook account for my blog.

Barthel Abraham, the man who came forward to this blog with the evidence of Jacob’s criminal case and new identity, has frequently reported to me that his messages keep disappearing. Under the Facebook post for my last article, he seems to have left five comments, but those comments are not visible to me, and my notifications tell me that there are no comments for that post, yet the post still indicates five comments. He suspects that either Facebook flagged him for spam, or someone has been following and reporting him – either Jacob himself, or possibly a minion of his.

What I am curious about is just who could be monitoring this account, if at all? If there is, I would suspect it to be Jacob himself. After all, he contacted this blog personally under the name Ya’akov ben Nahash in order to try and get me to tell his version of the story, and when I refused he changed his name to Baal Ben Shem and then deleted his account. There is an account active now called Baal Shem Tov, littered with anti-cosmic Satanist imagery. Could it be that he created this account so that he could report Barthel’s comments to Facebook? Or perhaps this is the work of his wife Michelle, a.k.a. Morana bat Nahash? Or maybe Jacob has someone as a contact for this sort of thing? But if there is someone monitoring the Facebook page of this blog, eager to spy on Barthel for some particular reason, I demand you to come forward and reveal yourself, because it is useless to hide. Jacob’s trail has already been discovered and brought to light, there’s little point in trying to obscure it again.

Addendum: Jacob McKelvy is trying to hide his trail, but he can’t

Just a few days ago I wrote an expose on Jacob McKelvy, detailing his new identities within the metal scene, and the criminal charges against him, in order to generate an account of what happened to the Jacob McKelvy Ministries, which he created as part of an evangelical grifting operation following his departure from the Greater Church of Lucifer, his previous grift. Towards the end of the expose, I stated that Jacob would rather that all of this not be brought to public attention, and it seems that I could not have been more correct. The day after I released that post, I have discovered that Jacob has not only deleted his main account but has also deleted the Bandcamp pages for his newest musical projects, Sitra Achra and Season ov the Witch, as well as the Facebook account called Kosem Ya’akov ben Nahash. It is possible that Jacob, after realizing that I will not assent to his desires, felt it necessary to eliminate any traces of evidence that would allow me, and you the reader, to piece Jacob McKelvy to his various personas. It has been suggested to me by Barthel that Jacob’s attorney may have told him to remove some material from the internet to leave as little as possible for prosecutors to look at.

Unfortunately for Jacob, I am not so easily bamboozled by these efforts, and I am determined to make sure that he cannot hide the truth from anyone. This post serves as an addendum to the expose that I wrote just a few days ago, a dossier of sorts by which to preserve everything relevant to the expose that Jacob may have tried to scrub from the internet, as well the basic facts of the case for posterity. This will consist of numerous screenshots detailing all of the relevant leads, but anything he has not deleted will also be represented by archive links. I have also been alerted to some new information pertaining to the Jacob McKelvy case, and this will also preserved here.

To start with, let us recapitulate the basic facts of Jacob McKelvy’s case. Below is the evidence from the office of the Harris County District Clerk website concerning the criminal cases against Jacob McKelvy.

The first of these screenshots is from when these records were originally accessed by Barthel. The latter two are newer screenshots. As you can see, the date for Jacob’s upcoming trial has changed. It was originally scheduled for March 31st 2021, but has now been rescheduled to April 16th 2021. Incidentally, this is just over a full four years since McKelvy’s arrest in 2017.

Below you can see all of the court settings for each of the two criminal cases:

Now let’s revisit the Jacob McKelvy Ministries via OpenCorporates

Below you will see what I have managed to save from the messages Jacob sent me in the early hours of March 24th. The account is called Baal Ben Shem, but when he messaged me he was called Ya’akov ben Nahash.

Ya’akov ben Nahash/Baal Ben Shem is unmistakably Jacob McKelvy. I already linked to this screenshot in my previous expose, but just for the sake of this dossier I will post it here again:

From what I understand, David Hogan and his father Robert Hogan have scrubbed as many references to Jacob McKelvy as they can. However, aside from the videos of Jacob McKelvy and his wife’s “conversion” that are still available and the articles that are still published, I have managed to find this post from David Hogan from February 27th 2017, which refers to Jacob McKelvy and is related to another post from Spring First Church showing Jacob McKelvy, his wife Jennifer, and what appears to be their baby attending service at Spring First Church.

This is important to have on record because, again, from what I am told, David and Robert Hogan have scrambled to remove all references to Jacob McKelvy from their Facebook page, and also because there is a page called Christian International, run by a famous charismatic preacher named Bill Hamon (I don’t know why but his name makes me think of Ba’al Hammon for some reason), which apparently used to contain multiple glowing references to Jacob McKelvy and his supposed conversion but has since removed all content relating to Jacob McKelvy. However, Hamon appears to have a website called Charisma News which still contains an article relating Jacob’s conversion narrative.

As was established in the previous expose, there is a world of evidence connecting Jacob McKelvy to the identity of Ya’akov ben Nahash. Here are the screenshots for the Metal Archives bio for Ya’akov Nahash and the Temple of Perdition Bandcamp page.

After my previous expose was published, Jacob deleted the Kosem Ya’akov ben Nahash account, hoping to remove any link between the two. Unfortunately for Jacob, Google doesn’t quite forget these things, and even though the account has since been deleted, you will still find links to them on the Google web search and image search.

And speaking of Vision of God Records, a quick trip to The Blackest Light, a web forum created especially for fans of Christian black metal (a.k.a. “unblack” metal), or more specifically their thread on Temple of Perdition shows an account representing Vision of God records all but confirming the link between Ya’akov Ben Nahash and Jacob McKelvy.

They also confirm that Temple of Perdition became a Satanist band, kicked out its Christian membership, and left the Vision of God label, as well as Jacob’s baptism. They even refer to Ya’akov by Jacob, his real name, confirming his real identity.

In the same forum, others have been following Temple of Perdition’s transition into Sitra Achra.

In the gallery of images concerning the Kosem Ya’akov ben Nahash account, you may have noticed a symbol depicting a three-headed fire-breathing dragon, containing within itself a sigil and tne name Ordo Aeterna Noctis. This is Jacob’s new occult organization, for which Sitra Achra is something of a musical mouthpiece. Here, of course, is their web page about it.

In fact, Temple of Perdition themselves were promoting them in the video for their song “The Bornless”, which later became part of Sitra Achra’s Hymn to Azerate. A praise to the angel Azrael attributed to the order appears at the beginning of this video, which is still found on Temple of Perdition’s YouTube channel (or, as you will soon see, one of them). The dragon sigil also appears at the bottom right corner throughout the video.

You may notice that Ordo Aeterna Noctis likes to talk about the “middle path”. One member of The Blackest Light talks about how (according to him at least) Ya’akov was working on a book with a group called Middle Path Ministries. Below is that post as well as what I have been able to find on their Facebook page, as well as their book on Amazon.

This feels somewhat familiar doesn’t it? For a start we can remark about how the same conversion story plastered all over evangelical news outlets is found here, though perhaps a touch more absurd. There is also the name Middle Path, and it can’t be too much of a coincidence that the same theme reappears in his Current 218 order.

After Jacob/Ya’akov/Baal attempted to contact me, he not only deactivated his account but has also deleted all references he could find of Sitra Achra, including the Bandcamp and Soundcloud pages of Sitra Achra. But like I said before, Google does not forget these things so easily, and there is still some trace of the band’s existence available. Let us start with what remains of the Sitra Achra Bandcamp page, which also contains material from Temple of Perdition.

And not only does Google not forget, but neither does Facebook it seems. An account for pagan music on Facebook shared a video for Ya’akov’s side project, what was then called Emrys, and in the comments of that video they also share a link to Sitra Achra’s Bandcamp account, along with its sister project, thus evidence of their existence remains on Facebook.

There was also a Soundcloud account for Sitra Achra that has since been deleted. Of course, Google still retains traces of its existence on its image search.

The YouTube account for Emrys still exists, has two videos on that account, and on its bio it describes itself as a side-project of Sitra Achra created by Yaakov Nahash.

After some time, it seems, Emrys changed its name to Season ov the Witch, and the two songs seen on Emrys later became part of a record released by and under Season ov the Witch. Although their Bandcamp page is gone, all of their tracks are available on YouTube, and their Soundcloud account remains active.

One of their songs, “Last Breath” was even released on the Temple of Perdition YouTube account for some reason, despite it seemingly having basically nothing to do with Temple of Perdition.

Even stranger is the fact that there are apparently two separate channels for Temple of Perdition, with similar videos and the same banner image but different profile pictures and were created at separate times. One of them has a status which states that they joined on August 19th 2014, some three years before Temple of Perdition was formed.

While we’re still on the subject of Temple of Perdition, here are some The Blackest Light users talking about how Yaakov has been delaying orders.

It is difficult to take the apparent refutation implied in that last screenshot seriously, but next let us look at Temple of Perdition’s post in which Yaakov talks about his financial woes.

All of this follows the pattern that was previously shown in the final days of his leadership of the Greater Church of Lucifer. GCOL members would complain about orders not being met, and eventually Jacob announced his resignation, citing his lack of ability to balance leadership of the GCOL with his family commitments, and then later on the other leaders revealed that Jacob had made off with all their money for his own personal use. This time, however, Jacob disbanded his band, while fans complained about orders not being met, and now he has announced that he is no longer a Christian and is instead a Satanist.

For reference, here is an official statement from the Greater Church of Lucifer from 2016 detiailing what happened concerning Jacob McKelvy’s resignation.

For further reference, here is their previous statement concerning Jacob’s departure, showing that they at first, at least ostensibly, believed Jacob’s reasons for leaving the GCOL, and so did their followers as a result. Jacob lied to them, and it was only a few months later that everyone figured out the truth.

Even this next post follows a familiar pattern.

This is worth bringing up for two reasons. First of which, Jacob cited the bigotry of Christian Texans as an influencing factor in his departure from the GCOL leadership in 2016, when of course the real reason was that he was about to be caught embezzling the organization’s money. Secondly, for all his talk about how his music was never Christian, one need only look at the lyrics to “Homage to the Dead” to see a clear lyrical narrative of his conversion to Christianity.

Indeed, the first lyrics of the song connect to a key part of the narrative, which states that Jacob was driven to the path to occultism and “Satanism” out of the depression that followed the death of his sister Anna, caused by a rattlesnake bite (alluded to by the line “a serpent’s kiss”).

The band themselves arguably did a poor job of hiding Ya’akov ben Nahash’s real identity. On their website, you can see a “Stone Yaakov” poster up for sale. At first, it looks like you can’t see anything, but if you click the image, you see an image of Yaakov that, more clearly than any other band photo, points to Yaakov as being Jacob McKelvy.

On this note, let us connect the thread to Sitra Achra’s anti-cosmic theme with his Instagram account, which shows several anti-cosmic imagery and bears what was going to be the cover of Inheritance of Lies as his profile picture, and not to mention bears the name Yaakov Nahash.

While the Ya’akov ben Nahash account on Facebook was deactivated, Jacob seems to have created a new Facebook account, this name known as Ba’al Shem Tov. And if you look at that account, you’ll notice that the same anti-cosmic Satanist theme appears on this account.

Ironically enough, that name reminds me of the alias of the famous Jewish rabbi and mystic whose real name was Israel ben Eliezer and who is well-known as the founder of Hasidic Judaism. Exactly what Jacob is thinking here is not clear to me. Perhaps it’s a call back to the Kabbalistic influences he started talking about during his time in Temple of Perdition? Or maybe the name takes on a different meaning for Jacob in light of his Current 218 belief system.

Now, you may remember Michelle, Jacob’s wife. During Jacob’s “conversion”, she can be seen with him alongside Pastor Robert Logan in the Spring First Church. She also seems to have been involved in his musical projects, and in the now-deleted Bandcamp page for Sitra Achra she goes by the name Michelle Nahash and is listed as a lyric writer for one of their songs, “The Damned”. Well, now it seems that Michelle goes by the name of Morana bat Nahash (or “Morana, daughter of the serpent”), and she too seems to be in on the same Current 218 angle as Jacob. She also seems to have “gothed up” (if you’ll excuse the awkward phrase) for her new role as an anti-cosmic Satanist. Also, there appear to be two separate accounts, one of them is listed as “Author”, rather like how there used to be an account for Ya’akov ben Nahash and a page called Kosem Ya’akov ben Nahash.

There are still images of the real Michelle McKelvy around. Let us see if we can’t establish a resemblance between Michelle McKelvy and Morana bat Nahash.

It’s crystal clear that Morana bat Nahash and Michelle McKelvy are in fact the same person. In fact, it’s so obvious that even the URL for Morana bat Nahash’s Facebook account gives it away.

It seems that Michelle for whatever reason followed the same Hebraic name convention as Jacob did, which suggests that the two of them are in on the act that Jacob is performing.

In addition, we can find Ba’al Shem Tov among Morana’s contacts, proving a definite connection. The red underline was added by me.

Morana bat Nahash also has an Instagram account to flaunt her Current 218 ways, and which incidentally contains more evidence of the existence of Season ov the Witch.

We also find images from both Michelle and Jacob under the #qayinite hashtag on Instagram, suggesting that they are beginning to circulate in Current 218 circles to at least a small extent.

Morana’s Facebook account also features the exact same image that was used by Ya’akov ben Nahash as his cover photo as one of her own cover photos.

As an aside, there’s a Quora answer written by her that details how she met Jacob.

To return to black metal, there is something I forgot to mention in my previous expose that I believe is worth mentioning. Temple of Perdition is not Jacob McKelvy’s first black metal band. I knew I remembered from the GCOL days that Jacob was doing a black metal project based on his Luciferian beliefs back in 2016, but after so long I forgot what he called it until now. He called it Ascension in Darkness, and I almost forgot what it was called until I performed a search for Jacob McKelvy on Facebook. Their website has been deleted, but their Facebook page remains and some of their material exists on it.

Their Facebook contains several links to a page called US13.Campaign-Archive2.com, which appears to be a dead link and leads to a Mailchimp page but certainly not to whatever was originally supposed to be seen.

There is a post on their Facebook that links to their Soundcloud account. It appears that this Soundcloud account is now called Ordo Aeternum Noctis, which may be another expression of Ordo Aeterna Noctis from before, and bears pretty much the same logo.

There is also reason to suspect that Ascension in Darkness is directly linked to Temple of Perdition. For one thing, I have seen one of their T-shirt designs resurface in Temple of Perdition, at least in an interview.

In fact, if you look closely at the cover art for Inheritance of Lies, you can see that Temple of Peridition have used that very same design in their artwork. You can see it in the background, obscured by a different image (the headless being flanked by skulls).

Then, there’s the fact that both Ascension in Darkness and Temple of Perdition have a track called “Nexion”, though there seem to be some differences, namely in that the Temple of Perdition version actually has vocals and lyrics. However, I would encourage you to listen to both the Ascension in Darkness version and the Temple of Perdition version and see if you see any similarities between the two. As far as I can tell, they are basically the same song, just that it’s been re-worked in Temple of Perdition.

Not only that, but the guitar that Yaakov Nahash uses in Temple of Perdition, or is shown to wield in one of the band photos for Temple of Perdition, appears to be exactly the same as the one that Jacob McKelvy used for Ascension in Darkness.

At a certain point, I start to wonder if Jacob was even trying to hide anything, but then that’d be me fooling myself. After all, if he was trying to keep everything out in the open, why the god damn mask for Temple of Perdition, for starters? Furthermore, why the need for this new pseudonym, or the other pseudonyms? And why did he scramble to delete as much as he could after contacting me? It’s obvious that Jacob, and probably Michelle as well, have something to hide, and I’m guessing it has to do with Jacob’s active criminal cases regarding child sexual assault, but either Jacob is so incapable of covering his tracks that he just can’t help but give the game away, or it’s just ridiculously easy to find out anything you want about the guy, meaning that no matter how hard he tried I would still have all this evidence on record, at least as long as I knew where to look.

Finally, just to tie everything back to the Jacob McKelvy Ministries saga, it seems that Jacob McKelvy’s Twitter account from 2017 is still up on the internet to this day. It’s not active anymore, it only seems to have joined on March 2017 and hasn’t posted after that month, but it exists.

If you look at the bio for that account you’ll see a link for a website that seems to go by “jacobmckelvy.org”. The link appears to be dead, but I think this was supposed to be the web link for what was the website for the Jacob McKelvy Ministries before it got shut down. If you search for “jacobmckelvy.org” on Google you’ll find other Christian blogs or websites spreading the same link, no doubt to promote the ministry Jacob started in 2017. Also, notice that the last post on that account is dated to March 21st 2017, less than a month before Jacob McKelvy was arrested on charges of child sexual assualt. The account was definitely not the most active account on Twitter, but the fact the account has stopped posting at all after March 2017 seems to connect to McKelvy’s arrest. If McKelvy himself is the man running that account, it seems clear that he stopped posting on that accout because of his arrest in April 13th 2017.

I believe that, for now at least, this is all of the evidence that I need to record. I’ve established beyond a shadow of a doubt that Ya’akov Nahash, and by extension Baal Ben Shem and Ba’al Shem Tov (not to be confused with the famous Jewish rabbi/mystic), are in reality Jacob McKelvy, the very same man who conned the Greater Church of Lucifer before ostensibly converting to Christianity, starting the Jacob McKelvy Ministries, and later getting arrested for child sexual assault and still awaiting trial after four years. To avoid this knowledge spreading, Jacob tried to delete whatever he could after having to deal with me, and well before I even knew about any of this he must have been working to conceal his identity from anyone he intended to work with in order to start his next grift. But no matter what, there’s nothing he can do to prevent the facts of this case being public knowledge. At some point, he needs to learn to face the music and just admit to everyone the truth that he has been concealing.

I have also established that Jacob’s wife Michelle appears to be playing a similar game, or rather partaking in the exact same grift that Jacob is doing. And I have to wonder, to what extent is Michelle in the dark about Jacob’s arrest and the nature of his criminal cases? I ask because this has many significant rammifications for the fact of her going along with all of Jacob’s shenanigans. Either Jacob hasn’t been telling her the whole truth and she’s being led on by the man she loves, or she does know and, because of commitment, she goes along with it anyway. Or maybe they both think that the charges are bullshit and that Jacob McKelvy is just the victim of a corrupt justice system that, for some reason, went out of their way to pick on Jacob in particular. Maybe Jacob convinced her of that at least, and I suppose that would make sense. It must seem better to tell the woman you ostensibly love that, rather than to tell her that you’ve been raping underaged girls behind her back. But when all is said and done, a white lie is a still a lie.

Once again, I hope this spreads as far as it can, especially considering that there is no media coverage I can find about McKelvy’s arrest and child sexual assualt charges, or about the collapse of the Jacob McKelvy Ministries.


The following pages have been archived for posterity, in case Jacob, Michelle or the Hogans decide to delete them

Baal Shem Tov’s Facebook account: https://archive.is/AcJzC

Michelle McKelvy’s Quora answer: https://archive.is/JhXBv

Morana bat Nahash’s Facebook account: https://archive.is/4hFC0

Morana bat Nahash’s Author page on Facebook: https://archive.is/ezNWj

Spring First Church’s post with Jacob McKelvy: https://archive.is/WTJ8R

Ascension in Darkness Facebook page: https://archive.is/uOPHz

Temple of Perdition’s website: https://archive.is/PK0MS

The Stone Yaakov poster on Temple of Perdition’s website: https://archive.is/0v7rg

The Ordo Aeterna Noctis page on Temple of Perdition’s website: https://archive.is/dLZvV

Emrys’ YouTube account: https://archive.is/L1zB5

The Temple of Perdition YouTube account: https://archive.is/Dv2fO

The other Temple of Perdition YouTube account: https://archive.is/R7ipw

Temple of Perdition Bandcamp account: https://archive.is/B0oT2

Season ov the Witch’s Soundcloud account: https://archive.is/2H9Nb

Ordo Aeternum Noctis’ Soundcloud account: https://archive.is/ebqUO

Middle Path Ministries Facebook account: https://archive.is/6Iyze

Middle Path Ministries Facebook About page: https://archive.is/O7Na4

Jacob McKelvy’s Twitter account: https://archive.is/Rb72x

Jacob McKelvy is now Ya’akov ben Nahash/Baal Ben Shem (and also a child rapist)

Three months ago I wrote a post about the current status of the Jacob McKelvy Ministries for the purpose of inquiry. In that post, I noted that the Jacob McKelvy Ministries had ceased operations in 2019, having dissolved following the forfeiture of its tax franchise. I had no idea what could have happened for his ministry to just disappear like that. At the time, I thought that either he had committed some tax fraud, or some other crime, or just didn’t make enough donation money for his ministry to survive. As it turns out, however, McKelvy may have been up to much worse.

Someone by the name of Barthel Abraham alerted me to two criminal cases recorded by the office of the Harris Country District Clerk, whose records are publicly available to anyone who manages to log on to their website. It seems that, on April 13th 2017, little under a month after he incorporated the Jacob McKelvy Ministries, Jacob McKelvy received two charges of child sexual assualt; one charge was the aggravated sexual assault of a child under the age of 14, and the other seems to have been the sexual assault of a child aged 14-17. Yes, you heard that correctly. Jacob McKelvy, as of 2017, has been charged with raping minors. You can log in to the Harris County District Clerk office website to find out for yourself if you doubt me, but these are active criminal cases that are on public record.

The basic facts are that Jacob McKelvy was arrested in April 2017, he has had emergency protection orders placed on him (those are basically orders that can be placed upon an abuser of any kind at any time after their arrest to prevent any additional harm being done), he is still waiting for a new trial, which is scheduled for March 31st this year, and he even has a set bond worth $30,000 and a bondsman assigned to him, though it seems he is not currently in custody for the moment. I’m sure once he gets his next trial and if he’s found guilty he’ll be doing some serious prison time. The aggravated child sexual assault case is considered a first degree felony, while the other offence is considered a second degree felony, the former can get you sentenced between 5 and 99 years or even life in prison while the latter can get you between 2 and 20 years in prison, so, all told, if McKelvy is found guilty pending his new trial, there’s a chance he could be going to prison for a long time indeed.

As a side-note, as I keep looking for information on McKelvy’s criminal case, it turns out that Jacob McKelvy has a bigger criminal history than I thought. In 1999, he was arrested for the possession of marijuana. That itself I would not consider to be wrong (I don’t even think marijuana should be illegal but that’s neither here nor there), but it was considered a criminal offence according to Texas law, so he was arrested, served his time, and was released on a $1,000 bail. There’s also an apparent case where, in 2002, he was arrested for theft and later released on bail. Now that’s definitely more serious. Indeed, it’s actually quite striking how McKelvy managed to get himself incarcerated twice in succession, just three years after the first time. In fact, I’m certain that this pattern dovetails nicely with his noted history of con-artistry in relation to the Greater Church of Lucifer and other Luciferians, not to mention his apparently still being registered as a Mormon while being the leader of the GCOL, suggestive of his overall deviousness.

Curiously, Jacob McKelvy still has a Facebook page, where he used a photo of himself from a GCOL opening in Costa Rica as his profile picture but goes by a new name: Baal Ben Shem. It seems to be inactive and I can longer see his account or send anything his way, but before I wrote this post it went by another name: Ya’akov Ben Nahash. I know that Nahash means “serpent”, and given this I suspect that this identification with the serpent is a call back to his former days as the leader of the Greater Church of Lucifer, which is consistent with his GCOL profile picture. Ya’akov, of course, is a Hebraic way of saying of Jacob, his real name, and so his new handle would thus read as “Jacob, son of the serpent”. It is a name that easily calls back to his former days as a self-styled (or so-called) Luciferian, likely in reference to the serpent in the Garden of Eden. If this is supposed to be a clever way to mask his real name and thereby hide his real identity, it’s a very pathetic attempt to cover himself, but then that he uses the photo from his GCOL days suggests that he has no intention of hiding anything. The account seems to have been created in 2016, and as far as I can remember Jacob defintely did have an account before that time when he was leader of the GCOL. As a matter of fact, it’s the same account that was originally named “Jacob McKelvy”.

Check out this Facebook post from Janet Key Newman Lynchard, who was a congregant for the Spring First Church Assembly of God, and you will see a link on this post to Jacob McKelvy’s Facebook account; hover over that link, and you will see the bio that now says Ya’akov ben Nahash, which confirms that they are indeed the same person (have this screenshot for posterity in case Lynchard ever finds out and decides to go back and delete it). Lynchard’s post might also be one of the only available pieces of evidence, on social media at least, left for Jacob’s born-again Christian act from 2016-17. Apparently both Robert Hogan, who you will remember as the pastor of Spring First Church who was seen with Jacob McKelvy and his wife during their public “conversion”, and his son David Hogan, who was the executive pastor for Spring First, have removed all references to Jacob McKelvy from their social media accounts. You’ll still find videos from evangelical YouTube channels and articles from local news and Christian media outlets fawning over the story of the “ex-Satanist” Jacob becoming a born-again, but most evidence of any ties between Jacob and the Hogans seems to have vanished from the face of the earth. When I looked for the Jacob McKelvy Ministries website in December, I couldn’t find it anywhere.

It’s entirely possible that the Hogans eventually discovered that Jacob had been using their movement as another front for con artistry, as from what I’ve heard there are people who noticed that Jacob did a similar “born again” act at completely different churches, warning others that he is a phony, and Michael W. Ford himself was busy warning other churches that Jacob was fraudster and a con artist. It’s may also be equally possible that the Hogans did not figure it out at least at the time, and instead decided to disassociate from him after his arrest in April 2017. It’s very reasonable to expect that anyone, including Christian pastors, would not want risk their reputation by having someone accused of the rape of minors in their company, and it seems reasonable to assume that they would have discovered the fact that McKelvy was in jail and waiting for a grand jury trial not longer after his arrest, so they would have scrambled to remove any trace of association with a man now known locally as a criminal rapist. This would also have direct relevance to the fate of the Jacob McKelvy Ministries, since the commission of a crime is a cause for involuntary forteitfure of assets according to Texas law. Of course, that the ministry just sat there for less than two years anyway is a bit curious. I can only assume that either someone took over the ministry, or it was just left to lapse into death after his arrest.

What’s fascinating, and perhaps bewildering, is the fact that, if you look at the Ya’akov ben Nahash account as it stands today, you won’t see any trace of his conversion to Christianity left. Not only is his profile picture that photo he took for the GCOL, but the cover photo he uses is a blasphemous depiction of Jesus as a half-human and half-skeleton figure, brandishing a stang staff wreathed in serpents in one hand and the lower jaw of some dead animal on the other, wearing a robe that bears some esoteric symbols. It’s possible that this is not simply a call back to his former Luciferianism, but a signal to anti-cosmic Satanism, suggesting that he has since exited Christianity and converted to said anti-cosmic Satanism. How did this happen? I believe I can answer this question, and to do that I’d like to direct you another aspect of this whole saga, one where things take a somewhat interesting turn.

It seems that Ya’akov ben Nahash, or Yaakov Nahash, is also the name of a musician who played for a Christian black metal band called Temple of Perdition, where he was the main guitarist as well as backing vocalist and keyboard performer. In fact, there is a separate “Musician/Band” account on Facebook which goes by Kosem Ya’akov ben Nahash. To be honest, I’m utterly convinced that the Ya’akov Nahash from Temple of Perdition is in fact none other than Jacob McKelvy, the very same Ya’akov ben Nahash from before, and in the scope of this post I hope I can adequately demonstrate why that is.

First of all, there are few band photos of Yaakov Nahash, but if you look at them you’ll notice that in most of them he is wearing some sort of mask; a white mask that covers the top half of his face and sports some portruding fangs like those a vampire. But from the bottom half of his face you can see a beard that looks rather similar to the beard sported familiarly by Jacob McKelvy. I will attempt to demonstrate my point below through a gallery of images, showing both Jacob McKelvy from his GCOL and post-GCOL days and Yaakov Nahash’s band photos side by side for you to judge for yourself.

And if you needed further proof to identify Jacob McKelvy with Yaakov Nahash, there are other band photos of Yaakov were he just looks like a man made of stone, and you can clearly see the resemblance to Jacob McKelvy. There is even a poster on what it seems was once the website of Temple of Perdition where you can find a poster of Yaakov that very clearly gives away his likeness as Jacob McKelvy.

If this is not enough to establish that the two are the same person, then we should take note of the biographical details that Yaakov has given out. On the Metal Archives page for Temple of Perdition we see that the band is based in both the US and Finland, having been formed between American and Finnish musicians (Yaakov Nahash and Corey Sorrenti from the US and Joonas Heikinen and Benaiah from Finland). The bio for Yaakov Nahash that we find on Metal Archives tells us very little about him, but it states that his real name is Jacob and that he resides in the United States. Other sources state that Yaakov formed the band out of Texas, where Jacob McKelvy resided and was also arrested. In fact, there’s a Bandcamp page for Temple of Perdition that lists their location as Spring, Texas. This is the same place where the GCOL headquarters was established in 2015, and is the same location that is listed as Jacob McKelvy’s residence on his Facebook account, which now goes by the name of Ya’akov ben Nahash. In an interview for Metal Mofos, Yaakov mentions that he was raised Mormon. From Michael W. Ford’s statement for the GCOL on Jacob McKelvy, which Satanicviews has recounted on his blog, Jacob McKelvy was a Mormon before he met Ford and in fact was still registered as a Mormon even while he was leader of the Greater Church of Lucifer. The Christian Metal Wiki seems to refer to Yaakov Nahash as “a former Satanist”, which, albeit from their perspective, is consistent with the narrative presented by McKelvy during his supposed conversion at Spring First Church. In fact, in Temple of Perdition’s song “Homage to the Dead“, from their EP of the same name which was released in 2019, we see a clear lyrical reference to this narrative in their lyrics. Here is the relevant section of the lyrics:

I was once a Lucifer’s child

Worshiped only myself

Then I saw a blinding light

That brought me out of hell

It spoke to me in vision sight

As many night and days fell

see the world with his eyes

A God made flesh will prevail

This is clearly his reflection on his “conversion” away from Luciferianism from a Christian perspective. Furthermore, the song opens with the lyrics “I was dead inside, She was taken from me”, which references the death of McKelvy’s sister, which is brought up as inspiration for his supposed childhood path to Satanism. But what’s even more strange is that, despite this, Yaakov insisted that the band was never intended to be a Christian band, and not a “Satanic” band either, merely a band with edgy criticism of religion. This is despite not only their then-label, Vision of God Records (a US-based label for overtly Christian metal bands), advertising them as Christian, but also their lyrics displaying a clear Christian theme. Homage to the Dead, besides chiefly being about Yaakov/Jacob’s “conversion”, talks very explicity about Jesus having died “for me”, demons bowing before him, and having Yaakov/Jacob washed in his blood. “Mstr Hchvshm” is a song that seems to be song condemning certain Christian preachers who make money off of their believers through deception, a point that must surely seem ironic considering the fact that Yaakov Nashash appears in fact to be Jacob McKelvy, the same man who grifted both Luciferians and Christians for profit. “Betrayal of Eve” is very obviously about the story of Adam and Eve and their temptation by the serpent (ironically a serpent is also part of Yaakov Nahash’s namesake, though perhaps not the same serpent). “The Last Temptation”, which features Rotting Christ’s own Sakis Tolis himself as a guest vocalist, recounts the Biblical story of Jesus facing temptation in the desert by “Satan”, and ends in a monologue about the fate of the souls who died and went to Hell (very non-Christian content I’m sure). “Symphony of the Flesh God” appears to be an indictment of people who “wield Satan’s torch” while representing the name of God, committing atrocities and devoting themselves to Mammon while calling themselves men of God. “Adonai” is all about God, and specifically about coming to terms with God in your life, “finding him” as it were. Although some songs like “Priests of Perdition” and to an extent “Symphony of the Flesh God” can be seen in a broader context of religious criticism, it seems that a great deal of the band’s lyrical content, contrary to Yaakov’s assertion, can be described as explicitly Christian. The albums do not show who the main writer for lyrics is, but I’m fairly certain that Yaakov is the main writer, and “Homage to the Dead” is a good enough clue at least.

In this sense, Temple of Perdition established themselves as a burgeoning Christian black metal act. This no doubt was to be Jacob’s next grift, targeting Christians once again, but for a grift it seems to have had at least some success, and somehow Jacob managed to get the notice of some serious talent in the world of metal music. There’s Sakis Tolis, of course, who is a well-established household name in metal internationally, as is his band Rotting Christ, but also Joonas Heikinen, the drummer for the Christian death metal band Renascent. Later on they picked up Ronny Hansen, the lead vocalist for Antestor, Steve Reishus, a drummer who played in Crimson Thorn and Taking the Head of Goliath, Luke Renno, a vocalist from those same bands, and a female vocalist named Henna Ojala. The bands mentioned here are all famous, mostly within the Christian metal scene, but the fact that the band got Sakis Tolis’ attention enough for him to volunteer as a guest vocalist tells me that the band certainly wasn’t a complete waste of effort. In fact, after listening to them myself over the course of my investigation, I find that their actual musical output has been more than decent (“Adonai” for instance, stands out in particular). But despite all of that, the band was not to last, and it is here that we come to that part where Jacob/Yaakov went from born-again Christian to anti-cosmic Satanist.

When the band started in September 2017, it was clear that they were going to pursue Christian lyrical content, albeit with a tendency towards religious criticism. This is reflected in their first album, Tetragrammaton, which they released in 2018. Over time, however, the line-up for the band shifted significantly and frequently, with two of the original members leaving the band and being replaced with new ones in rapid succession. Supposedly it can be traced to disagreements over religion within the band. At some point in 2019, the band apparently ceased to call itself a Christian band, they parted ways with Vision of God Records, Christian musicians left the band while Yaakov continued to play under a more “secular” approach, an approach which somehow did not preclude Kabbalistic and Hermetic influences or the release of songs entitled “Ode to Yah” (very secular I’m sure). And then, something all the stranger occurred. In June 2019, it was announced that Nahash had disbanded Temple of Perdition, claiming that he could no longer manage the band, releasing two singles on June 3rd before calling it quits. Two months later, however, the band reformed with a new line-up and abruptly announced their intent to release a new album titled Inheritance of Lies. The album was never released, but the band did release a track promoting the album called “The Bornless“. The song’s content marks an unequivocal departure from their previously Christian themes, opening with praise of the angel Azrael “who is bathed in the thoughtless light of HVHY”, who is implored to “open the gates of Abaddon and hear the whispers of those who seek you”, with a reference to some group called Ordo Aeternum Noctis. The lyrics also contain references to Naamah, a demon who appears in Jewish mysticism, and to Tiamat as bequeathing gems from her earth. This looks like a pivot towards some sort of anti-cosmic Satanist doctrine. That pivot would soon realize itself on a deeper level.

Not long after Temple of Peridition’s abrupt reformation, they appeared to disband again. However, in 2020, it turned out that the band had changed their name to Sitra Achra, reflecting a focus on Qliphothic and anti-cosmic themes. The album that was going to be Inheritance of Lies ended up becoming Hymn to Azerate, with a new (and shittier) cover, a new (and more generically edgy) band logo, and some new songs alongside some material that was already released under Temple of Perdition. In addition, the Facebook page for Temple of Perdition was changed to Sitra Achra, and there’s a separate Bandcamp page for Sitra Achra which features not only Hymn to Azerate but also the previous releases from Temple of Perdition, namely Tetragrammaton and Homage to the Dead. All of the musicians from Temple of Perdition who came from Christian bands, like Ronny Hansen from Antestor, have since left the band and been replaced by non-Christian musicians. One of the songs also features Jacob McKelvy’s wife Michelle (fyi: I incorrectly referred to her as Jennifer in my previous post on the subject; that has since been corrected before this post was finished) as a lyric writer for the song “The Damned”, and she goes by the name Michelle Nahash. Yaakov also has an Instagram page which uses what was to be Temple of Perdition’s album (Inheritance of Lies) as a profile picture, and every photo on the account is an image referencing some aspect anti-cosmic Satanism, including an altar for ritualism and even the image now used in Yaakov’s Facebook account. There’s also Ordo Aeterna Noctis, which appears to be a new esoteric religious order created by Yaakov, probably some time in 2019, seems to affiliate itself with the anti-cosmic Current 218, and is consistently referenced in Sitra Achra’s content and social media. Stranger still, after Temple of Perdition became Sitra Achra, Yaakov was also doing a “dark pagan folk” side-project named Season ov the Witch (a.k.a. Emrys).

The order claims to advocate for what it calls “the middle path”, a way to “create a full balance between the light and the dark”, which honestly sounds a lot like what the Greater Church of Lucifer was already talking about but without the association with Current 218. The order’s web page even uses the term “black flame” to refer to “the thoughtless light”, referencing the dark side in some way, and this term clearly seems like an echo of his former GCOL days. The rest of that web page appears to be a mish mash of semi-doctrines and talking points inherited from a hodge podge of esoteric sources including Hermeticism (perhaps “For all is mind and the universe is mental” can be seen as an indication that he finally did read the Kybalion after all) that are somehow woven into the basic idea of Current 218 doctrine. It’s all not particularly coherent, and this honestly makes me suspicious that this is Jacob McKelvy pulling another fast one in the Left Hand Path movement.

It’s not really clear to me what made Yaakov decide to apparently convert to anti-cosmic Satanism, but there are aspects of the Temple of Perdition saga that remind me of what happened during Jacob’s time as leader of the Greater Church of Lucifer. When Temple of Perdition first split up in June 2019, Yaakov used the band account to state that he disbanded the band because of financial issues, saying the following:

There comes a time in life where things get so bad that one has to worry about their family before anything else. It seems We just cannot get out of our financial hole. (Please do not pray for money). I am about to lose my house, My wife is threatening to leave me and take the kids because of this money situation. I have been selfish in pursuit of my own dreams and did not see what they needed so I have to put it all aside and focus on them. I have 2 days to come up with $1200.00 for rent so I have to sale everything.

For those who saw this from the position of being fans of Temple of Perdition, this must have seemed tragic. But I’ve known Jacob McKelvy since 2015, and I was there for his departure from the GCOL leadership in 2016, so I recognize this like it was still fresh. When Jacob McKelvy resigned from his position in the GCOL and left the organization, he talked about how he couldn’t balance the responsibilities of leading the Greater Church of Lucifer with the needs of his family, coupled with the bigotry from local Christians directed towards the GCOL. Some time before this, GCOL members had complained about delayed purchases and orders from their website, and almost immediately after Jacob left it was revealed by Jeremy Crow and Michael W. Ford that Jacob McKelvy had appropriated the money that was supposed to go to the GCOL for himself, to spend on his own various recreational desires. And think about it: if Yaakov was in such dire financial straits that he couldn’t manage Temple of Perdition anymore, how come he was able to return to the band just two months after he announced its disbanding? Did God suddenly give him the $1,200 he needed at his darkest hour, did he receive an influx in donations right as he was about to call it quits, or could it be, as I suspect, that financial difficulty has nothing to do with this decision, if there were any such difficulties at all? On top of that, just like with his time in the Greater Church of Lucifer, when you follow the drama surrounding Temple of Perdition from 2019, you will find fans complaining about orders not being filled, such as a vinyl being ordered but with no updates after two months, and there have been some accusations of Yaakov not sending out T-shirts when he was supposed to, though these may or may not have been disproven as far as I can see. So it seems to me that there’s a familiar pattern that connects Jacob McKelvy with Yaakov Nahash, to the point that they are quite literally the same person.

Also, there is just so much bullshit involved with Yaakov’s project here that I feel it deserves a mention here. During his time in Temple of Perdition, Yaakov insisted that he was not really a Christian and that his band, though it consisted of predominantly Christian musicians and it featured Christian lyrics, was not a Christian band. If this was the case, why was Temple of Perdition signed on to Vision of God Records, an explicitly Christian label for explicitly Christian bands, for whom a lack of express commitment to Christianity would be incompatible? Why did he only part with Vision of God in 2019, when he decided it was time to make his music more “secular”? And if Yaakov never intended for the band to be Christian, why was there the need to “secularize” its existing songs? When Jacob McKelvy left the GCOL, he vitriolically denounced occultism in general as an “egotisical cumshot” before apparently converting to Christianity. So what was he doing as Yaakov Nahash talking about drawing inspiration from the Kabbalah and Hermeticism, apparently just months after converting to Christianity, and then eventually embracing Current 218 style Satanism and creating a new occult order, after previously having denounced things like occultism and the Left Hand Path? Furthermore, why is there another god damn ministry telling the story of Jacob’s conversion away from Luciferianism (with a giant load of added bullshit about how he was recruited by an “underground occult organisation” and being initiated by some “order of the 12 apostates” in Italy), alongside the Jacob McKelvy Ministries? Is Yaakov involved, and did he write a book for them?

OK, so enough with all of that. What does all of this have to do with the Jacob McKelvy Ministries, or the sexual assault charges against Jacob McKelvy? I can only speculate, but based on the evidence at hand I believe I can construct a theory. Below is what I think happened.

After Jacob McKelvy left the Greater Church of Lucifer once he realized it was only a matter of time before his shenangians would be discovered by the other leaders, and after he “converted” to Christianity, he started the Jacob McKelvy Ministries, likely intending for it to be another way to make money off of religious people, this time Christians. Then he got arrested by Texas police, who seem to have found probable cause and gotten a warrant to arrest him on charges of raping two underaged girls. At some point after his arrest, he was let out of custody pending a new trial, but now that he was known locally as a possible child rapist his newfound evangelical friends had already decided they wanted nothing to do with him and scrambled to try and forget he was ever involved with them, and some of the locals in Spring may have heard about his arrest and naturally shunned him as well. Jacob may also have decided that he couldn’t keep running the Jacob McKelvy Ministries anymore, but then it still seems to have existed for over a year after he got arrested. It could be that he just let it lapse into being broken up by the government. Jacob may have decided that he wanted a new grift, and at some point he may have decided to revisit an already present interest in metal music, so decided to form a new metal band, somehow getting the attention of well-established musicians in the process. He would continue to reference the whole conversion angle that he invoked at Spring First Church, but since his evangelical grift ended badly, he thought of a new angle involving Kabbalah that would allow him to expound Christian faith while acting anti-religious at the same time, all while signed to Vision of God Records. Because he’s waiting for a trial for child sexual assault, Jacob would have wanted to conceal much of his identity, so he creates a mask for himself and a new name, Ya’akov Nahash (or Ya’akov ben Nahash), giving away as few biographical details as possible, so his new bandmates and fans would have had little idea about who he really was, and they certainly must not have known about his arrest or else they might have refused to work with him in the first place. Eventually his old Jacob McKelvy Ministries expired as time went by, having been involuntarily dissolved and its website disappearing from the internet, and meanwhile Jacob was probably conning his fans and his bandmates, and by June 2019 he pulled the same grift that he did with the GCOL, that he was running out of money and needed to call it quits, only for him to restart the band in short order. The fact that he jumped towards “secularizing” the band’s content and leaving Vision of God Records after he started the band again suggests that this act may have been a ploy to begin his next move: to start a new Left Hand Path order, one where he would marry the ideas presented in the GCOL with some kind of anti-cosmic Satanism, and through this order make money off of gullible LHP-niks once again. As far as I know, there’s only a Facebook page for Middle Path Ministries, so it could have just been a prototype for the Jacob McKelvy Ministries since it was active a month before the Jacob McKelvy Ministries was incorporated. I can’t find any information about Middle Path Ministries outside of their Facebook page and that book on Amazon, so I have no idea if they were ever incorporated. In any case, his effort to cover his tracks probably worked, since Temple of Perdition fans who observed his rapid religious shifts can only guess that he was a lost soul, taken under the lord of confusion and going from faith to faith, when in reality everything Jacob/Yaakov did – his work with the Greater Church of Lucifer and encounters with occultists, his conversion to Christianity, his Kabbalistic spiel with Temple of Perdition, his newfound Current 218 project – was all part of a long line of hustles he had been orchestrating over the course of several years, and that the Christian metal scene was just his where latest victims were.

Personally, I don’t think Jacob/Yaakov believes in anything when it comes down to it. Michael W. Ford mentioned in 2016 that Jacob was a registered Mormon while he was still GCOL leader, and for all I know, that could still be true into the present, but then this might not be suggestive of his real convictions, and could simply be a vestige of his upbringing. I suspect that he will continue to find grifts, particularly as all of his efforts at starting organizations, including bands by the way, seem to keep falling apart. His hustles can seem to be effective in the short term, judging by the apparent success of the GCOL and Temple of Perdition, but they have a habit of not lasting for very long. Based on this we can surmise that Ordo Aeterna Noctis will likely die out within a year or so, in the same way that his other projects did, and he will likely seek out a new venture. Perhaps eventually he’ll decide that Islam is his next target, “converting” to Islam the same way he did for Christianity before and changing his name to reflect that (perhaps Yakub would be a predictable moniker for him). In such a situation whether he goes for the progressive moderate route or the radical anti-American Islamic fundamentalist route is just a matter of what the nature of his grift calls for, though I think the latter would get all eyes on him, which he would probably want but it might also prove to be his undoing. Of course, all of this assumes that he isn’t found guilty of sexual assault after his upcoming trial. Indeed, he can’t do much conning and grifting while sitting in prison for what could be the rest of his life.

The only mystery in my view is why the lack of media coverage? Think about it: when Jacob McKelvy was there to open up the Greater Church of Lucifer for their first physical headquarters in Texas, the organization was all over local news, thanks in part to Jacob’s own efforts to reach out to journalists. When Jacob left the organization, his conversion to Christianity was widely publicized with the help of evangelical media outlets eager to spread word of a real-life ex-Luciferian conversion to the faith. But when I look for news articles concerning his arrest on child sexual assault charges, I can’t find a single thing. I know he was arrested because there are active criminal cases against him recorded in the Harris County District Clerk records, but despite that his arrest has not received any media attention. Nor has the collapse of Jacob McKelvy Ministries, which he founded after his conversion. And like I said before, I’m fairly certain that nobody who worked with him in Temple of Perdition knows about the arrest either. That’s why I decided to write this expose, so that I could play some role in getting all of this out there to anyone who might see it.

The last thing I will say, and I will say it for posterity, is that Jacob McKelvy/Ya’akov ben Nahash/Baal Ben Shem would rather that all of this not be brought to public attention. In fact, yesterday he sent some direct messages to the Facebook page of this blog, which read as follows:

I would be happy to tell you the truth about all that has happened. There was no scam ever committed on my end and I kind of sick of seeing this false stuff being posted. So I will set the record straight if you really want to hear it. If not then I guess that old world I left can continue to believe the false narrative.

I do not have anything to hide, So if you really want to know what evet happened to me then you can hear from me rather than second hand hearsay and people who are frightened to lose their dark image.

Keep in mind I am not interested in make this a self pity party of self defense. I know when I screwed up and can and have admitted to it many time over yet this narrative still plays out like I was some sort of devious scam artist. So I will leave it at this.

While this looks like a plea for the chance to open up about the past, it seems rather more likely to me that he had somehow been made aware of my plans to publish this post and tried to change the “narrative” being put forward in his favour. After I rebuked his efforts and challenged him to explain to all those Luciferians from the GCOL where their money went, he changed his account name to Baal Ben Shem and then seemingly disappeared. I think he knows that he can expect to be damned in full view, and with his new trial just a week away, there is little point in trying to stop the truth from coming forward.

Anyone who ever dealt with Ya’akov ben Nahash during his Temple of Perdition days should come and read this to see who he really was. If, like me, you knew Jacob McKelvy during the GCOL days and more or less stopped following him after his “conversion”, come and read this so you can be brought up to speed with everything that happened since. Everyone else, come read this anyway in order to learn the truth about Jacob McKelvy, or Ya’akov ben Nahash, or Baal ben Shem. I hope as many people as possible stumble upon this article, so that they can be innoculated against any lies that Jacob might be trying to spin now.