Recently I’ve been seeing that Nathaniel Harris has been up to his Satanic Panic shenangians again, which my friend James Hind has been covering a lot of as late. For those not in the know, Nathaniel Harris is a man who used to be an occultist, in fact I think he used to be a Chaos Magician, and he used to collaborate with the well-known Luciferian Satanist Michael W. Ford. But at some point, for reasons I’m not sure I understand, Harris not only renounced occultism, he also viciously attacked every occult movement and alternative religion and accused a conspiracy of Satanists of abusing him and several children in connection to the Kidwelly sex cult case from over ten years ago.
As it happens, I have some memory of the case, though nothing really direct. When the case broke out, I was just a teenager who happened by the story on a newspaper in my area while sitting on a bus. Looking back, am I entirely surprised to have had some exposure to vaguely “occult” happenstance early in my life? Ha, that’s probably meaningless conjecture. But I think that Nathaniel Harris’ persistent relitigation of the Colin Batley case is a good opportunity to examine that very case, so as to examine the true nature of the so-called “Satanism” attributed to him.
Key in this enterprise should be an assessment of Colin Batley himself, or more specifically his beliefs. Colin Batley is the man who ran a cult that abducted, tortured, and sexually abused several children in Kidwelly until he and his accomplices were caught and arrested by the police in 2010. Batley had apparently moved to Wales during the 1990s after previously living in London, and it’s said that he had been involved in multiple instance of sexual abuse for decades. Throughout local media, Batley has been referred to as a “Satanist” or someone “dedicated to the study of Satanic material”. The “Satanic material” in question is never referred to. In my attempt to research Batley’s motives, all references to Satanism are very clearly ascribed to him by others. There is no first-person description that makes use of the term Satanism, so the term is clearly not self-referential. As to the practice of Satanism, it’s not obvious that this is what the cult was doing. What we at least ostensibly know of their ritual practice is that it involved incense burning, disrobing and going “skyclad”, and having copious amounts of sex, often involving wife-swapping and coercion. Well that would certainly be evidence of a prostitution ring with a lot of ritual trappings, and a very low-effort approach to ritual, but still no sign of anything recognisably or distinctly Satanic.
One of the few books actually referred to in connection to the case is The Book of the Law. TheBook of the Law, written by the almost legendary British occultist Aleister Crowley, not a Satanist book. Rather it is considered a central part of the canon of Thelema, and is believed to have been inspired by the message of a being named Aiwass. This book, alongside The Book of Magick and Equinox of the Gods, were purportedly read out in Batley’s cult, and it’s reported that each member of his cult kept a laminated copy of The Book of the Law. The way Wales Online covered this back in 2011 was in some ways laughable. It referred to The Book of the Law as “the occult bible” and its author Aleister Crowley as an “arch-Satanist”. Such lurid misrepresentations are the mark of a misleading sensationalism usually expected of some gutter tabloid rag.
In any case, Crowley himself could not be called a Satanist. He in many ways played an essential and dual role in shaping the modern Left Hand Path as we understand it today. This manifested through both his denunciations of the “Black Brothers” who according to him deified their own ego-consciousness and are thus counted as “of the left hand path”, which to him surely meant the “wrong” path within Thelema, and through his own antinomian, transgressive, and ethically libertarian spiritual praxis, laden with blasphemies and sexual magick as a part of a broad system by which to attain the True Will, which is thus very consistent with pre-modern understandings of the Left Hand Path. But however iconic and even essential Crowley and his philosophy and praxis are in shaping the modern Left Hand Path, he would have counted himself as a practitioner of the Right Hand Path within the context of his belief system, and he rejected the way that Satanism emphasizes the veneration, worship, and in some cases even excarnation, of ego-consciousness. Crowley was thus, despite referring to himself as “The Great Beast 666”, not a Satanist and not a practitioner of the Left Hand Path. And, although Thelema has Left Hand Path variations and spin-offs, such as the Typhonian Ordo Templi Orientis and Fraternitas Saturni, and can potentially be practiced in the fashion of the Left Hand Path, Thelema is not itself a religion of the Left Hand Path, and its adherents would likely reject such a label.
It is also worth noting that, in the eyes of both practicing Satanists and practicing Thelemites, Colin Batley would be considered a criminal failure. One of the main points of principle for both Satanism and Thelema concern individual agency. For Satanism, it is repeatedly emphasized that the sexual abuse of both adults and children is intolerable. In Thelema, it is not uncommon for adherents to practice and espouse a form of self-discipline as means of cultivating the True Will. On both fronts, Colin Batley is surely a failure, due to his use of coercion and psychological slavery as a means of fulfilling his obviously abusive and predatory desires. On its own this would merely demonstrate that he was a bad Satanist or a bad Thelemite, but this requires the assumption that he was either a Satanist or a Thelemite, and the evidence for this is not what it seems.
Returning to The Book of the Law for a moment, it is worth commenting upon the fact that the book was submitted to Swansea Crown Court in 2011 during the trial of Colin Batley and his accomplices, in which the prosecutor Steven Murphy accused the book of “containing worrying trends and themes”. He claimed that the book encouraged people to have sex with everyone and anyone, endorsed prostitution, and he even accused the book of promoting rape, and further complained that he had tried to read The Book of the Law and gave up, while asserting his faith in Mormonism and the Bible. Well isn’t that cute, mindlessly abjuring an occult religion through slander on behalf of a Christian sect that is widely considered to be heretical by many other Christians. The judge even described Batley as having “lived up to your mentor, Aleister Crowley”. The obvious question that arises from this is, did Aleister Crowley keep people as sex slaves? Do any Thelemites do that outside of the context of BDSM or kink? It seems to me that a religion known for prizing individual freedom albeit in a very mystical sense would not endorse a system of sexual slavery or chattel slavery, and I think that the actions of Colin Batley and his accomplices are not very representative of the ethics or ethos of Thelema, even though both Colin Batley and his prosecutors ignorantly assume the contrary. Further it would seem that, if The Book of the Law did indeed sanction rape, let alone sexual slavery and pedophilia, we would find that all adherents of Thelema would be responsible for committing such behaviours, but of course most are not. I also think that, if the prosecution did read The Book of the Law, they certainly didn’t make much note of the end of the book which says the following:
The study of this Book is forbidden. It is wise to destroy this copy after the first reading.
Whosoever disregards this does so at his own risk and peril. These are most dire.
Those who discuss the contents of this Book are to be shunned by all, as centres of pestilence.
All questions of the Law are to be decided only by appeal to my writings, each for himself.
There is no law beyond Do what thou wilt.
This part of the book, perhaps more than many others, is barely understood even by many Thelemites, and some purchase the book out of an eagerness to understand Thelema and then read that last part and, in some cases, burn their copy of The Book of the Law thinking that they were supposed to do it. This more than anything establishes the often cryptic nature of Crowley’s pronouncement within the book, and suffice it to say that literalism is not going to help you understand what Crowley is saying here. To be completely honest it’s actually something of a relief that The Book of the Law wasn’t banned in Wales over this case.
Another problem concerns a threat apparently made by a member of Colin Batley’s cult to then-teenage girl, who he reportedly said would “go to the abyss” if she did not have sex with him. This is a blatant distortion of the teachings of Thelema, both on the part of Batley’s associate and on the part of a media that appears uninterested in challenging such distortion. The Abyss, in the context of Thelema, is not a place of punishment equivalent to the Christian concept of Hell. Rather, the Abyss is meant as the “storehouse” of all phenomenon, the source of all impressions as relevant to the world in which they are manifest – “the Real”, as Crowley put it, which originates from a noumenal realm known as “the Unreal”. Guarded by a demon named Choronzon, the Abyss is also the place that those seeking the highest level of mystical attainment within Thelema must cross in order to dissolve their ego-consciousness and become a “babe of Babalon”. It is not a place that a person may be “sent to” after death, rather it is a threshold that must be willingly crossed in life, and even then this can only be done after a long period of preparation. Thus, to threaten to send someone the Abyss in the context of Thelema is utterly absurd. It also doesn’t make sense in Satanism, either, since none of the variations of Satanism that I have seen in my years of study endorse any doctrine of punishment after death. Such nuance, of course, is not grasped by the prosecutor, who rhetorically asked Batley “Do you really think there’s a difference between the pit and the abyss?”.
It is impossible to find evidence that members of Batley’s cult used Satanic symbols to identify their belief systems. Instead, reports seem to say that members of the cult used the Eye of Horus, a symbol of the Egyptian god Horus, to symbolise membership. This is certainly not a symbol of Satanism. It may have been given some vague connection to Thelema within the cult in that Horus is a central divine figure within Thelema, but even in this light, I have not seen the eye symbol used by Crowley or within Thelema historically. It is possible to interpret this in terms of a broad fascination with ancient Egyptian religion, though it is certainly not a reconstructionist attempt to actually revive ancient Egyptian polytheism. Of course, The Daily Mail claimed in their article that Batley’s cult was host to serpents and “Satanic” symbols such as inverted crucifixes, but of course the less said about The Daily Mail the better.
From the evidence available we can conclude that Colin Batley, though certainly guilty of sexual abuse and practicing slavery, was not a Satanist, despite what the media appears to suggest. It is arguable that he may not even be a Thelemite, since during the trial he demonstrated no discernible grasp of the teachings of Thelema or The Book of the Law, despite apparently utilizing it in his cult and handing out copies of it to his followers. I think it is likely that Colin Batley was forming an idiosyncratic and highly dysfunctional charismatic belief system which slapped together whatever proved useful to his end goal of justifying the abuse of children as it suited him, with no real underlying religio-magical philosophy, praxis, or theology. He may have claimed inspiration from The Book of the Law, but nothing appears to suggest that he consciously identified with either Thelema or Satanism, and in the trial he could barely answer for any given religious conviction.
Now, how does this connect back to Nathaniel Harris? Ever since Harris began abandoning the realm of occultism entirely, he has become something of a poor man’s Geraldo Rivera on the internet, spewing his incoherent conspiracy theories about Satanist pedophiles to what I assume to be the few who actually listen to him. He went from defending Satanists and occultists from Christian moral panic to becoming a servant of that same hegemonic paranoia, and his extolling of the narrative of Colin Baltey as a Satanist serves this. As a conspiracy theorist, he no doubt believes that he is challenging a media apparatus that is complicit in some Satanic conspiracy to commit ritual abuse by not covering his theories about how he was abused by devil worshippers, but in reality he is at least serving the line put forward by the media that seeks to frame Colin Batley’s cult as a sincere manifestation of Satanism and the teaching of Aleister Crowley, which the media frequently depicts as being one and the same. He thus contributes to the broader phenomenon of Satanic Panic and the vilification of the occult and alternative religions within the media, which frequently goes unquestioned even in the supposed tolerance of modern secular liberal society.
Guys like Nathaniel Harris should be opposed at every turn. But we, and he, should also know that he is never going to win in the long run. His conspiracy theories about how he was abducted and abused by the Batley cult will never have purchase anywhere, and I’m willing to bet that if he ever tried to take the stand in court his case would be soundly defeated in short order due to the sheer lack of evidence on his side, and the actual victims of the Batley cult would rightly condemn him for shamelessly exploiting their trauma to his own benefit. Yet, the Satanic Panic that he serves is not so easily defeated, and will continue with and/or without his efforts, because the truth is that Nathaniel Harris is such a small and ultimately petty player in a much grander social phenomenon, in which spiritual alterity is constantly marginalized in order to uphold the social order. That is what must always be challenged, and eventually dismantled.
I think that one other thing to take away from this is that, insofar as secrecy is still a thing in occult praxis, at least on an interpersonal level, I have a bit of a better understanding as to why that is; and it’s not because they’re hiding criminal activities or some bullshit like that. Although some practitioners, such as Peter Grey and R. J. Womack, are of the view that secrecy is a source of power for occult practice, I think one of the real reasons is simply the fact that few people actually seem to understand the works of occultism, and most people are uninterested in trying to understand it, much less study it in a sincere academic context. As such, misunderstandings are common, sometimes even deliberate, and popular culture and media sensationalism feed off of the distortion that is so common in society. It is for this reason that occultism could be summarised in terms of “anyone can get into it, but it’s not for everyone”, much like how Stephanos Chelydoreus has described mystery traditions. Of course, a lot of contemporary Satanism tends to opt for a different response: namely to follow the lead of The Satanic Temple in casting Satanism as an entirely secular and aesthetic ideology meant to communicate libertarian and progressive opposition to religion or communicate a particularly aggressive mode of secular atheism, and then sometimes reject all else as “not real Satanism”. But regardless, the fact that occultism or alternative religion finds itself frequently, almost violently, misunderstood may lend itself to an appreciation of secrecy.
Indeed, there are four cryptic precepts classically associated with occultism: to Know, to Will, to Dare, and to Keep Silent.
This is what I think Nathaniel Harris believes he’s getting up to
Addendum: It seems that both Nathaniel Harris and more sympathetic observers say that I claim that Nathaniel Harris claims that he was kidnapped by Colin Batley and his cult. As far as I can tell, this is not true. I state that Harris claims to have been abused by Batley and his cult, which is based on James Hind’s many articles discussing Nathaniel Harris and his conspiracy theories, which often make reference to Harris’ own claims on the matter. But to say that I claimed that Nathaniel Harris was kidnapped is not quite true.
How would the average British person react if I told them that I would rather live in a society where I have to deal with women getting more willing to be violent than a society where I’m not allowed to go out and about past 6pm? Or a society where the only recourse is to put your trust in the state and its enforcers to save us? That’s where my mind turns now that we’re all talking about the police failing to protect women again. This comes after the Metropolitan Police admitted that they had failed to spot the warning signs that indicated Wayne Couzens was planning to rape and murder Sarah Everard, and then released a statement of advice for women who don’t trust certain male officers?
You want to know what the police advice for women being threatened by lone officers was? Literally, it was just call 999, shout out to passersby, run into a house, or wave down a bus. Yeah, if you’re a lady and you think you might be in trouble from a predatory police officer, you’re being expected to call the cops…on the cops. And also wait for someone to come get you, by which point for all you know the predatory cop has already caught up to you. So all that institutional self-reflection that translates to no substantial institutional reform.
But meanwhile, what is our advice to ourselves? I mean, besides everyone telling each other than men in general are the problem, at which point the question still arises as to what to do. There are some who maintain that a curfew, in which men would not be allowed to leave the house after 6pm, is the solution. Putting aside the fact that such a proposal would be so authoritarian as to almost make Soviet Russia look like Switzerland, do you really trust the police to enforce it and protect women, and do you really think it will make the rapes go away? Sure, it might mean less rape and murder on the streets in theory, but what about the rape and murder committed in your own home? What good is telling men they can’t go anywhere if some men will just abuse women when they come home from work anyway?
Some suggest that the answer is to simply vote for a party that wants to reform or fund the police. As I thought about the discourse about police violence, it occurred to me that the Labour Party and its supporters are caught in an obvious contradiction. On the one hand, they seem to acknowledge the issue of police officers responsible for systemic violence against women, not to mention racial minorities. On the other hand, as part of their central focus on the public sector, they tout as their solution to the problem, and crime in general, pumping more money into the police. That in theory means more officers on the beat, which we’re told should mean less crime, but how do we know it doesn’t also mean more Wayne Couzens’ in the force for every “good cop”? Also, when we consider Keir Starmer selling the Labour Party as some kind of “law and order” party, that’s surely be a slap in the face for anyone remotely concerned about the institutional problems of the police. Don’t even bother talking about the Tories. Boris Johnson is out there telling you to just trust the police, so he’s definitely not on your side. And the right’s answer is in general just “more cops”, and completely ruling out any talk of systemic reform in favour of some meaningless rhetoric about individual responsibility. So, “voting for the right party” is truly an empty set of words.
But why do we tell ourselves this stuff anyway? That’s what I’m more interested in than anything. When you talk about how we should encourage women to defend themselves with pepper spray or weapons, some people go at you and think you’re absurd, or even just enabling psychopaths down the line. When you point out that self-defence laws in this country are draconian as fuck, gods forbid start to inquire about the sense of powerlessness that this helps engender, people think of it as ridiculous to even talk about and some will even accuse you patronizing women. Because you know, wanting women to be free and exercise power in their own lives is the same thing as patronizing them, whereas begging the state to oppress as many people as possible isn’t, for some bizarre reason that frankly I’ll never understand. If you can’t trust the state to protect women, since the police as its armed enforcers are clearly going to abuse them and the major political parties won’t do jack shit for you, why not teach each other to rely on ourselves and each other and no one else? Why is this seen as such a ridiculous or even dangerous proposal? Is it not more dangerous to keep relying on the same structures of power that seem to be literally trying to abuse and kill you just so that they can police the behaviour of everyone else?
Still, though, my question remains unanswered. Why do we tell each other this stuff? In my view, it all rests on powerlessness. We do not have any real power over our lives. Brexit has not changed that, despite all the rhetoric about “sovereignty”. Our democratic freedom consists of occasionally voting for alienated representatives to decide our fate on our behalf, while the actual conditions of our lives are totally out of our hands. That’s true for all so-called democracies I suppose, but in our country self-defense is weird. Officially, according to the Criminal Law Act 1967, it is legal to use “such force as is reasonable in the circumstances in the prevention of crime”. In theory, you have the right to self-defence. Pepper spray, though, is illegal, and carries the same penalties as owning a gun, which would mean that, as far as the law is concerned, a pepper spray is legally the same thing as a firearm. This is despite the fact that, unlike how a gun can be used, pepper sprays are non-lethal. So self-defence may be legal, but your options for how you defend yourself are pretty limited, at least next to what we might consider to be common sense. We talk so much about what men can do to make women feel safe at night, and it always seems like, when we talk about that conversation, we’d rather do anything except give women the ability to actually fight back against people who might abuse them, like we’re afraid of women becoming aggressive in defence of themselves. And to that end, we continue to put our trust in the same police force that is happy to shield rapists like Wayne Couzens until it is no longer convenient to do so, the same political parties that defend the same institutions and oppose meaningful systemic change, and the expanding power of state control over our lives. All of it seems like a mask for our own powerlessness, a powerlessness which is the only thing that the British person seems to have any pride in. “English liberty” is said to be the chief virtue of British society, but since that “liberty” doesn’t actually exist and almost never has done, the real “virtue” of British society can be more described as “English civility”. Simply put, the British value respectability and civilizational normativity over human life and freedom, and I think that this is unlikely to change.
While checking in on the Joshua Caleb Sutter story I noticed something peculiar. It seems that mainstream media outlets have proven just a little late to the party, having only started reporting on the story days after Ali Winston broke the original story in a Twitter thread on August 21st, ten days ago.
For a quick recap: recent court documents have all but revealed that Joshua Caleb Sutter, the founder of Tempel ov Blood and otherwise prolific white supremacist, was paid tens if not hundreds of dollars by the FBI to give them insider information on neo-Nazi organizations like the Atomwaffen Division. He was arrested in 2003 on charges of illegal ownership of firearms before being picked up as an informant on their payroll. You can read more about it here.
As of this writing there are three news articles covering this story. Vice was the first outlet to run the story, their article was published on August 25th, the New York Post published their article on August 26th, and lastly the Jerusalem Post published their article on August 28th. All of the articles cite Ali Winston’s thread containing the official court documents as their main source – in fact, the New York Post article also cites the Vice article as a source – and they all cover the basic facts of the Sutter revelations, but what has me wondering is that even the first of these articles is four days apart from Winston’s thread.
The revelation that the US government has been paying a prolific white supremacist and neo-Nazi as an informant is surely a shocking one at least for many and its rammifications are disturbing for the US intelligence agencies. As I’ve discussed previously, it means that FBI money, which I might add comes from taxation from the public, has been going towards Martinet Press, who publishes Tempel ov Blood’s books as well as other works of esoteric fascism, and probably Sutter’s other adventures such as the Rural People’s Party, a party that advocates for Juche ideology, idolizes the Kim dynasty, and openly supports the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. That should be far more widespread than it is. The fact that only three outlets have picked it up seems a little strange.
For some reason I feel reminded of how nobody found out about Michael Aquino’s death until right-wing websites like Heavy.com covered it, and even then they only found out about three weeks after Satanists had already discovered that Aquino had died. I covered the story of Michael Aquino’s death on June 29th last year after picking it up from Satanists well in advance of QAnon and their coteries ever discovering it. But then at least you could say somebody from Vice thought to cover the Sutter story within a matter of days. I can only assume that there are schedules involved regarding what stories are published when, but then you’d think that Nazis getting paid by the FBI would be a priority scoop.
Of course, perhaps we should be charitable with Vice considering that recently it seems that any attempt to seriously cover the infiltration of the US military by neo-Nazis can be slandered as distasteful and even dismissed as conspiratorial by reactionary elements of the public and the US establishment. Funny how the populists and neocons of the right all team up to protect fascists. I would say I wonder how the right-wing is processing the Sutter story in light of this context, but then I think I can intuit that they probably hadn’t even considered it at all.
I imagine E. A. Koetting doesn’t need much introduction for anyone who’s ever been involved with or followed the Left Hand Path in any sense. Koetting (whose real name is Matthew Joseph Lawrence) is sort of infamous for his “Become a Living God” brand and his line of books on occult Satanism, and his name is well-known enough to show up in many familiar Left Hand Path occult spaces. But despite his relative popularity, I never liked him or took him seriously. I mean, as titillating as YouTube videos about love spells or sex magick with bondage thumbnails on them must seem, especially now that I’m unfortunately single again, I have never taken any interest in his books, videos, or his web forum. In fact, when I looked him up in the past, it did not take long for me to see that he was in no way the “living god” that he liked to position himself as or that he offered to help you become, due mainly to the arrest of both himself and his wife in 2014 for abusing mephamphetine and illegal gun ownership. It certainly strikes me that a “living god” in the sense implied by guys like Koetting would not face serious problems with narcotic addiction or the authorities, and that’s not because of them being good little boys either just so we’re clear on that. His weird thing for meth still hasn’t gone away, at least judging by his apparent claims that methampethamines are some kind of entheogen in his recent book Herbarium Diabolicum.
Truth be known, even though he is relatively popular in the left hand path scene, E. A. Koetting is actually fairly notorious in occult communities, where there are many occultists who despise Koetting and see him as a scam artist and a phony. Despite all of that, however, Koetting has maintained a certain status as a successful occult author in the field of Satanic magic and has thus retained some currency within the broader Left Hand Path. I believe that this is a problem, and Koetting must be challenged. I have recently stumbled onto the YouTube channel of a polytheistic Hellenic pagan going by the name Aliakai. They have two videos on the subject of E. A. Koetting, and they both contain some very disturbing facts about Koetting, which I would like to share here.
Aside from a lot of seriously scammy shit that Koetting peddles, such as in one book where he unbelievably claims to have revealed a forbidden cipher from some esoteric order that nobody could solve, he seems to have been affiliated with the Order of Nine Angles, that infamous Nazi Satanist sect responsible for multiple terroristic murders, and may have drawn some influence from them. He also appears to describe “sanguinary vampirism”, as in literally draining human blood for consumption, as part of the practice of black magic, to the point of arguing that reluctant and unwilling donors are the best source for human blood and thereby power for the black magician, and that the path of the black magician involves continually practicing “sanguinary vampirism” until eventually he/she eventually moves on to feasting on “blood essence” instead. Essentially, Koetting is saying that part of his black magic belief system involves attacking and potentially murdering people to feast on their blood in order to gain more and more personal power. He even explicitly outlines a practice of constructing a ritual space specifically for human sacrifice, a “Temple” as it were, which can involve killing someone any number of ways so long as it happens within the “Temple”. He also argues that blood sacrifice is a way for the magician to destroy his old world and create his new world, and further that sacrificing animals allows the magician to confer the characteristics of that animal onto him/herself. This would mean that actual ritual murder is a part of the magical practice that Koetting advocates.
In another book, Koetting argues for indiscriminately murdering people by magical means on the grounds that the act of killing is proof of a person’s godhood by his/her separation from the food chain and sets the magician on the path to using “the power of God to reign as God reigns”, which is to say the absolute power over the lives of others according to his/her own desires. I can’t help but wonder if the irony of a Satanist, who would otherwise rightly rail against the God of the Bible, advocate for a path where the aim is to be the God of the Bible and behave in exactly the same way he does, is lost on him or not. He also writes that the black magician revels in and celebrates the killing of his victim through his magic, and gradually eliminates any feelings of remorse on the grounds that, by killing whoever he wants, he is gaining the power to challenge the gods. Thus, killing people and ridding yourself of any feelings of remorse or empathy is part of the path to becoming a god. And when you become a god, according to Koetting, you will find yourself utterly alienated from the rest of humanity, having few friends who you only see as tools ultimately and marinating in the belief (or more accuraretly delusion) that the human species could have ascended to godhood but instead chose to be “nothing”, and consequently operating under the assumption that your fellow humans’ deaths are meaningless, if anything almost excusable, on the grounds that they could have been gods if only they tried. If you told someone who isn’t a complete psychopath that this is how you think, they would see you for how monstrous, evil, and sociopathic you are, because these are monstrous, evil, and sociopathic beliefs. And for Koetting, that might just be the point, since the whole idea is to rule in the manner he thinks a god would. He also adds a weird victim complex to the whole thing by saying that black magicians often start as victims in some way or another, as if that makes Koetting’s psychopathic worldview understandable.
Here’s an apparent photo of E. A. Koetting taken from when he was arrested for drug abuse, just as a reminder that this lowlife is the dude talking to you about how to become a god.
Like Anton LaVey before him, Koetting claims to have actually murdered someone through magical means. Koetting specifically claims to have murdered his ex-girlfriend through black magic and justified it on the basis she was “slandering” his reputation by spreading false rumours about him sexually assualting her, murdering infants and leaving the dead and decapitated bodies of felines on her porch. It’s actually kind of funny to see him treat these rumours as obviously false but then say that she needs to be “silenced” because of it. You know, judging from what else he’s written in his books, even if the supposed rumours were false (I can’t actually verify even that she made rumours to start with or even who this ex-girlfriend is), you can kind of believe that Koetting would actually do stuff like this, because why not if you believe that killing innocent people and animals gives you personal power and is all part of you becoming a god, not to mention that you probably shouldn’t need to “silence” anyone if the “rumours” against you weren’t true. Think back to any case you can think of someone being secretly murdered for political reasons, and you’ll get the picture. And frankly, since I still treat my ex with whatever support, care, and honour I could muster, after everything, I find what Koetting claimed to have done to be utterly reprehensible and dishonorable, and it tells me that he probably only ever viewed his ex as an object for his whims in a way that is honestly unfathomable to me. But that ex was not the only person he claimed to have killed. He also claims to have killed another woman who he claims faked having a disability in front of him and had him do house chores for her.
On a side-note, it’s discussed in his book Ipsissimus that he was raised by Mormon parents. He apparently claimed elsewhere that his parents were Satanists and members of a Satanic cult. Very bizarre. But, more crucially, for me at least, it reminds me of yet another figure who was raised Mormon and then tried to set up a cult status within the left hand path and then went on to commit horrible crimes. It seems that both E. A. Koetting and Jacob McKelvy have a strange habit of having two completely different and conflicting backstories presented to the world, which is probably not surpising in that both of them are also brazen con artists who try to use occultism or some form of alternative spirituality (or in Jacob’s case, Christianity as well) as a means to make money from people who don’t know any better.
Perhaps most importantly, it seems that E. A. Koetting was a member of Tempel ov Blood, an offshoot of the Order of Nine Angles that is particularly devoted to vampirism as means of creating a new being capable of bringing about the “Day of Wrath”. This is the same Tempel ov Blood that published Iron Gates, that unspeakably grotesque dystopian novel which begins with a baby being killed in front of its mother and is considered required reading for its membership, and who was in the process of taking over the Atomwaffen Division, that infamous neo-Nazi militia, to the point that many neo-Nazis started abandoning Atomwaffen. Tempel ov Blood is notorious for their celebration of sexual violence, mass murder, terrorism, and racial holy war, and their leaders are white supremacists, such as Joshua Caleb Sutter who served as a propagandist for the DPRK (I’m not kidding, the DPRK literally appointed him as their PR guy) and larped as a Hindu priest before eventually joining the O9A. E. A. Koetting, for his part, wrote numerous articles for Tempel ov Blood under the alias Archaelus Baron, published through Ixaaxar Occult Literature, in which he encourages prospective members to study the “Terrorist Handbook” and take up military training in order to learn how to kill, advises that assassinations are sometimes necessary and states a preference for targeting religious figureheads, and explicitly tells people to never kill a person if they have a reason to kill them, entailing that murder is to be carried out at random, on a whim, targeting anyone, without requiring any justification at all. He also apparently went by another alias, Drill Sergeant 666, within ToB. There’s also a bit of mystery surrounding Koetting’s present relationship with Tempel ov Blood. Some occultists believe that Koetting is still a member or supporter of Tempel ov Blood and that he only publicly disavowed them while, in private, he either remained a member or is making financial contributions to the group. If that is true, then it would mean that Koetting is using his Become A Living God brand as a front to funnel money to an occult Nazi organization, which is something that should not be allowed to continue.
As if that’s not enough, Koetting’s work just might have played a role in the murder of Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman at Fryent Country Park in Wembley. The murderer, Danyal Hussein (who is currently 19 years old), was a member of Koetting’s Become A Living God forum, where he says he infrequently practiced magick since 2015, briefly got into “spiritual Satanism” (whatever he means by this), believes that he is a “psychic vampire”, and says that his main challenge was summoning a demon who could help him get a girlfriend. He killed the two women as part of a supposed pact with the demon Lucifuge Rofocale that he believed would enable him to win the “Mega Millions Super Jackpot”. This pact required him to sacrifice six women every six months in order to avoid suspicion and arrest by the police. He also had a list of requests for a demon named “Queen Byleth”, who he hoped to summon in order to make some girl he knew fall madly in love with him and make himself more attractive. Hussein was arrested for the murders last year, had his home raided by the police shortly afterwards where they found evidence of his pacts, and was found guilty just last month. He was also especially vulnerable to falling under the influence of dangerous ideologies so his school referred him to a radicalization programme in 2017, and with little to no social support he struggled to socialize with others and especially with girls. It also seems that he held some kind of Nazi-esque ideology and he believed himself to be an “Aryan”. If I may comment, it doesn’t seem that Hussein was very smart, not just because of the mind-bogglingly stupid nature of thinking you can kill six women a month and avoid being caught, but also because he seemed to genuinely think that they would never identify his DNA because he refused to give a blood sample.
The actual pacts and spells found in Hussein’s house, specifically as relates to Lucifuge Rofocale, have been linked to E. A. Koetting’s book, Lucifuge: The Lord of Pacts, which is also co-authored by several other left hand path occultists, including Michael W. Ford, V. K. Jehannum, Orlee Stewart, Bill Duvendack, and more. However the book itself is prohibitively expensive, being sold on Miskatonic Books for $159, and if you go to the Become A Living God website he offers it via certain tiers with a price tag of close to $600. So Danyal Hussein must have had a hard time getting the book, if he did get his pacts and spells from that book. However, in my experience, I have found that it is possible to find some occult works as PDFs if you know where to look for them, and I have at one point been sent entire folders of works by people in the scene. That’s a very useful way to learn about any sort of occultism because actually buying lots of books on the subject is very expensive and a lot of distributors are frankly extortionate price-gougers of the highest order. If Danyal Hussein made a sort of spiritual family for himself in the BALG forum and related communities, it’s entirely possible that he may have accessed the book as a PDF or had it given to him by someone interested in helping him become a magician.
The “pact” made and signed by Danyal Hussein for Lucifuge Rofocale
On top of all that, Koetting and his cohorts apparently advocated for the use of a ritual by which the magician would communicate with the spirits of Covid-19 and “hijack” their “frequencies” (awfully New Age-sounding I notice) for the purpose of supposedly protecting yourself from the virus by “making friends” with it. Naturally, this video comes with a disclaimer in the description which stresses that it cannot replace official medical advice, not that you’ll see them say that in the video. Or maybe the whole thing is J. S. Garrett’s idea and Koetting just happens to put it on his channel and doesn’t necessarily buy it himself, which would be something but it still means he’s on record platforming this. So not only are we dealing with people who advocate for literally murdering people in service of undead gods with the aim of becoming a god yourself, we’re also dealing with people who have their own version of those dogshit evangelical Christian faith healing solutions to Covid-19 – you know, the sort of thing they concoct specifically to justify not following the guidelines and not temporarily halting in-person congregations. Truly a cut above Christian superstition and slave mentality I must say. But I suppose it’s not beyond the remit of someone who offers to turn your crush or your ex into a magic sex slave, make you fall in love yourself, create your own wealth empire out of nothing for you, defend you against any esoteric adversary, help you make a blood pact with any spirit, and other assorted woo benefits all to the tune of $1,600 for a private consultation session. I have to feel bad for anyone who didn’t see the word “SCAM” written all over Koetting’s body when they saw this shit. It’s like Koetting may as well put “holy shit they’re actually giving me money!” somewhere on his web pages and maybe someone would still fall for it. Of course, we shouldn’t forget about the fact that relying on this ritual would probably result in some people dying of Covid-19, at least because they decided to do this instead of self-isolate or get vaccinated.
So, we have a situation where Koetting, as a prominent author of Satanic occultism, is instructing people to commit murder on a whim and enjoy it in order to become a god, by which he clearly means an absolute ruler of creation, and who is quite probably connected to a Nazi organization and has definitely produced ideological and spiritual guidelines for them, under their banner. E. A Koetting is still active today, he still writes books, still makes money off of his shitty brand, he still peddles his grift about personal godhood, vampirism, and how to make a woman your love slave, and more recently, despite his possible association with fascism, he’s busy talking about “Satanic revolution against fascist slave-gods”. He also evidently still manages to hang around high-profile left hand path figures – or perhaps more accurately, they associate with him and promote his work – so he is still treated as a legitimate voice within left hand path communities or by their figureheads. His YouTube channel currently has 87,000 subscribers, his videos tend to get thousands of views each, his Facebook account boasts 128,998 followers, and his Instragram account has 3,717 followers, so he retains a very large social media presence at least. His Become A Living God forum is still active and it seems that there is a lot of activity on the forum, and the Facebook page for the website has approximately 2,500 likes. Put together, he still has some popularity to boast, and that makes him a problem, especially when you consider that people on his forum literally talk about offering people as sacrifices to gods. Not that that’s particularly surprising, though, because Koetting himself has openly advocated for human sacrifice as part of the practice of Satanic occultism.
You know, people talk about “Reverse Christians” in relation to certain people who position themselves as Satanists. You know what I mean, right? Those edgy, and often young, criminals who kill people and do vandalism, flaunt vaguely “satanic” or at least anti-Christian symbolism while doing so? These people usually have no real attachment to Satanism in a religious sense and are often just insane. But here, in the case of E. A. Koetting, I think we can see some semblance of what is clearly a somewhat conscious case of “reverse Christianity” in an actual ontological sense within the context of religious or occult Satanism. I mean there’s the obvious faith healing grift that sounds like the stuff you get from evangelicals if not New Age spirituality, but there’s also a clip in which E. A. Koetting literally talks about the End of Days being upon us, which is just a transparent invocation of the Christian eschatology and sounds rather like you’re talking to a Christian fundamentalist, but instead of this End of Days leading to God’s kingdom on earth it’s supposed to lead to “a new cycle of ascent” towards “ultimate self-godhood”. In fact, it’s probably not for nothing that he comes from a Mormon background and moved his way into Satanic occultism, since Mormons do actually believe in a certain kind of self-deification to the effect that the Church of Jesus Christ and Latter Day Saints actually believes that humans can become like God. Not to mention, in his books he talks about using the power of God to reign exactly as God does (or “as the gods do”, it’s contextually interchangeable in this framework).
That’s the most stark expression of “reverse Christianity” you can think of: while opposing the God of the Bible, you strive to become the God of the Bible. This would mean that even as Koetting talks about rebellion against fascist slave-gods, the whole concept of “self-godhood” in his belief system means to become one of them. The whole thing is situated specifically in the Christian (or “Judeo-Christian”) framework, and to be honest it has me asking the question. Why, as a Satanist, knowing how bad the God of the Bible is and literally telling your audience that he hates you, would you want to become anything like him? YHWH rules with a cruelty, tyranny, and hate unmatched by pretty much any of the other gods, and he demands absolute faith and expects perfection from his followers, and if you misstep from that your reward is eternal damnation, so why would you want to actually rule and behave in the way he does? It doesn’t make sense to affirm the power of YHWH in this way while positioning him as a fascist and yourself as Satanic opponent of God’s tyranny. But I suppose this is what can happen when a person leaves Christianity behind while failing to challenge its deeper premises internally (this is part of what is called “latent Christianity“). It would be rather sad were it not for the fact that we’re dealing with a guy who cultivates a way of life centered on the total domination of everything and everyone around you by a narcissitic individual subject, and also whose record consists of getting whoever he can to kill people and animals on a whim just like the God he supposedly despises.
I mean there’s latent Christianity and then there’s basically Mormon heaven but for extreme esoteric Satanists
I’m afraid at this point I must also talk about Michael W. Ford, or more specifically one unfortunate thing he may or may not have in common with E. A. Koetting, and a little more, based on some information that has come to my attention while looking into Koetting’s involvement with Tempel ov Blood. According to some occultists at least, Michael W. Ford was also a member of Tempel ov Blood at one point, and apparently some say he claimed to have left. It’s extremely difficult to find any information about Ford’s alleged involvement with Tempel ov Blood, and Ford himself emphatically denies ever being a member or contributor, but besides an old forum where a reader of his makes this claim, we can see that ToB’s Liber 333 apparently has sections and excerpts within it that are authored by or at least to attributed to Ford both under his real name and under the aliases Michael Nachttoter and Baron von Abaddon (both of which he also used for some of his musical projects) and attributed to the late 1990s, back when he was in the Black Order of the Dragon and Tempel ov Azathoth, and it’s said that Ford introduced a guy from ToB called Fra.13 to the concept of vampirism (or “Wamphirism” as it’s also called) and provided comparison between his system of vampirism and the system utilized by ToB’s Vampyric Order. In fact, there are quite a few pages dedicated to Ford promoting his own Tempel ov Azathoth and Black Order of the Dragon as well as expounding on his own concepts of esoteric vampirism.
If you’re familiar with Ford’s work, especially his older catalogue, you probably know that Ford has a major thing for vampirism and vampyric magick, and likes to mix it in with all sorts of other esoteric ideas and belief systems. That doesn’t sound too far away from what E. A. Koetting likes to do. In fact, the two authors seem to be closely connected, and in Liber 333 Ford tends to promote ideas about cultivating an eternal magical will that survives the death of the flesh, not too dissimilar to the way Koetting talks about how the old and the worldly dies and as you progress towards “the Eternal”. Ford also talked about how the Black Order of the Dragon aims to use “sinister archetypes” to unlock “the psyche of European and Euro-decended man and woman”, which sounds very racialist and folkist, and while promoting BOotD he even advocated for culling the masses. He even talks about draining “astral lifeforce” from human “prey”, not too different from Koetting’s ideas. Michael W. Ford appears on the Become A Living God website as a collaborating author, nine of Ford’s books are published through Become A Living God, and Ford has promoted Koetting and given introductions to his work. Koetting, in turn, wrote a foreword for one of Ford’s more recent books, Apotheosis: The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Luciferianism & the Left Hand Path. More relevant to the subject of Tempel ov Blood, it is well-known that Ford was a member of its parent organization, the Order of Nine Angles, and has published and written introductions for O9A works, and even though he publicly disavows the O9A, he still makes money off the O9A works he published.
It’s worth mentioning again that Ford denies ever being in Tempel ov Blood, and he claims that rumours to that effect are based on a confusion of the fact that his Black Order of the Dragon was sanctioned by Christos Beest, who apparently was his mentor at that time, from around 1993 to 1997. It must be said that it is true that Liber 333 does not refer to Ford as a member of ToB itself, and instead refers to him as a member of Black Order of the Dragon. This would in theory mean that Ford was not actually a member of ToB, but then he somehow has considerable writing within Liber 333, which means that, even if he was never a member, we can only conclude that Ford’s Black Order of the Dragon and Tempel of Azathoth were in some way affilitated or associated with Tempel ov Blood and exchanged ideas with each other, which as far as I’m concerned is no better than simply being a member of ToB. We should also note that Christos Beest (whose real name is Richard Moult) was a high-ranking member of the Order of Nine Angles since the 1980s, and is still a member to this day. Although in 2001 he claimed to have left the O9A and converted to Catholicism, Beest in reality was still in the O9A and produced documents and media promoting O9A teachings, such as his manifesto “The Dreccian Way” (in which he straightforwardly advocates for “culling”), and his Tarot deck “The Emanations Tarot” (which features artwork containing, among other things, a pale-faced woman holding the severed head of Claus von Stauffenburg and a rifle favored by the SS), and he has even admitted to retaining a friendship with David Myatt, the O9A’s founder with a well-known background in neo-Nazism. Even if we take Ford at his word that he was never a member of Tempel ov Blood, it’s honestly not a good sign to know that, per his own admittance, his mentor was a Nazi, but then it’s already known and acknowledged that Ford used to be an O9A member for a few years. He even used to peddle the idea that the O9A was really an anarchist organization instead of a Nazi one in his Book of the Witch Moon, which is actually a tactic the O9A has trotted out before and will tend to do whenever they face external scrutiny over their political ideology. In that book he even claimed that the O9A didn’t practice cullings depsite their own express word to the contrary. Book of the Witch Moon was originally published in 1999, a year after Ford is often said to have left the O9A in 1998, supposedly after he found their fascist beliefs objectionable, which is odd when you consider that he goes on to refer to the O9A as anarchists. In fact, in Apotheosis: The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Luciferianism & the Left Hand Path, he still explicitly refers to the Order of Nine Angles as anarchist, and this was from a book published in 2019, after the O9A again became well-known for their Nazi shenangians.
As I said before, Ford has still published and had writings featured in O9A books long after he supposedly left the Order. One of those was Codex Saerus – Black Book of Satan I, II, III, which was published by the O9A in 2003 and its second edition (published in 2008) includes a forward by Michael W. Ford in which he praises the O9A’s Black Book of Satan as a grimoire capable of challenging stasis and order and essential to the understanding of Satanic magical tradition. Christos Beest and Anton Long are also listed as authors, and the book contains the infamous O9A “Mass of Heresy”, in which Adolf Hitler is revered as a saviour sent by “our gods” to lead the “Aryan” race, Hitlerian salutes are performed, and the phrase “Hail Hitler” is uttered. Keep in mind that all of this is from a book that the O9A advertises as a collection of “anarchist” ritual workings – just what “anarchist” rituals involve praises to Hitler and celebrations of Nazi ideology? – and this is the same book Ford praises as essential to understanding Satanic magical tradition. That’s a worrying indication of Ford’s stance on esoteric Nazism. There is also another O9A book titled Order of Nine Angles: The Sinister Collection, apparently published in 2007, and it is a compilation of writings from O9A members and associates which also has Ford’s name attached to it and contains some his work. In the same year, Ford also published an edition of yet another O9A book, NAOS: A Practical Guide to Modern Magick, originally written by Thorold West, and in the foreword that Ford wrote for this edition he appraised the book’s practices of magickal development as similar to his own system of Luciferian Witchcraft, and justifies publishing it on the grounds that he deems that it is “worth being in any esoteric library”, despite not subscribing to the ideas and methods of the O9A (a difference that is not even downplayed, merely alluded to in passing).
The Codex Saerus, Black Book of I, II, III, second edition; this book contains unambiguous praise for Adolf Hitler
Now, tell me, doesn’t something sound off to you? What we know for certain, or at least what is more or less the official story, is that Michael W. Ford joined the Order of Nine Angles in 1996 and was a member for a few years until he left the group supposedly because its fascist or neo-Nazi beliefs become too objectionable for him, which may have been at around 1998. So what was he doing defending the Order of Nine Angles, claiming them to be anarchists as opposed to Nazis, one year after he left? And if they were not Nazis or fascists, and instead were anarchists, why did Ford find the O9A’s views objectionable enough to leave? What are some of Ford’s writings doing in Tempel ov Blood’s Liber 333? And why does Ford still claim that the O9A were anarchists into the present day, even after they’ve increasingly become even more notorious for their involvement with violent Nazism? Ford has claimed that he was more of an anarchist in those days and that he was never interested in Nazism. So why are there writings from the 1990s where he talks about European racial consciousness and the need to awaken it, and why was he talking about cullings? Now, granted, that’s his teenage years and he was young, but at the same time he can’t claim that he was an anarchist back in those days when nothing of the sort is suggested in his writings except perhaps in name alone. Despite the official story that he left the O9A after a few years, he has still published O9A works under Succubus Publishing, which he owns together with his wife Hope Marie-Ford, which means that although he claims to have abandoned the O9A for being too extreme and fascist for him, he still published O9A books from his label.
Not to mention, what was it about the O9A that proved to be too extreme for Ford anyway? Supposedly he left because it was a neo-fascist group and he got sick of their neo-fascist ways, but there is no reason to assume that was a problem for him before, because there are writings from him where he talked about European racial consciousness and supported cullings like everyone else in the O9A did, and his mentor Christos Beest was a literal neo-Nazi, so I think there is cause to doubt that he was seriously bothered by the neo-fascism. Perhaps he suddenly changed his mind at the time? Unlikely, considering he published and promoted an O9A book containing a Mass devoted to Adolf Hitler as basically a classic Satanic text. Or was that change of heart and everything else was all just more misinformation, like the kind that Christos Beest manufactured when he told everyone he left the O9A while all along he was still a member? And even if Ford did decide that the O9A were neo-fascists, that doesn’t matter because he continued to claim that the O9A were anarchists even after that and to this day, which is an O9A tactic designed to obfuscate their true nature, and he still published books from the O9A, who he supposedly decided were too fascist and extreme for him to keep company with.
On those grounds we have to consider that, even if we can accept that Ford was not a member of Tempel ov Blood at any point, perhaps there is more to the story of his involvement with ToB and the O9A proper than he is willing to tell us. And the fact is that he has writings contained within ToB’s Liber 333, so even if it’s true that he wasn’t a member, his claim that he never contributed to their esoteric oeuvre is simply not true, and in fact I would go so far as to call it a blatant lie. In any case, it’s quite possible that the true extent and history Ford’s involvement with the O9A might not actually be apparent to us, and it is possible that we can’t even be sure that Ford ever even left the O9A, and even if he did leave them, he certainly never stopped supporting them.
To return to the subject of Koetting and his belief in the practice of human sacrifice to gain personal godhood, I had a thought about this as I was writing this post. Isn’t it so funny that we keep seeing people espouse insane conspiracy theories about the ruling class practicing Satanic rituals involving blood sacrifice supposedly to confer some kind of benefit from it, even though none of those people – Donald Trump, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, Prince Andrew, Bill Gates, none of them – have ever been proven to be involved with any real Satanism or occultism or anything like that, and meanwhile you have people who actually do believe in human and animal sacrifice as a way to literally become a god or gain personal power and none of them ever get put in the center of some far out conspiracy theory, whether that’s QAnon or god forbid some jokey Chapo Trap House bromides about Moloch? I don’t see why we would even need to neglect the conspiracy angle, since we know that Tempel ov Blood literally conspire to infiltrate violent groups so they can use them as vehicles through which to commit random acts of murder for sacrificial reasons as part of their plan to become gods, and that they tried to do this with the Atomwaffen Division. As strange as this must sound, there actually is a shadowy group of people who call themselves Satanists and want to kill innocent people at random specifically for magical and sacrificial reasons, and they even cover themselves up by wrapping their movement in a shroud of conflicting information, but they’re not part of the ruling elite (though they certainly believe that they are some kind of esoteric elite) and don’t represent all of Satanism, and while I’m sure the far-right and the QAnon crowd despise them and would react with disgust if you told them about their activities (as I’m sure almost anyone would), you won’t see people talk about Tempel ov Blood conspiracies ad infinitum. In fact, a lot of the discussion I see about Tempel ov Blood activity comes from anti-fascist activists trying to curb the influence of their parent organization, the Order of Nine Angles, though you will also find it in news reports. The simple truth is that the Satanic Ritual Abuse quacks have always cared more about the invented and fantastical Satanic murder and abuse conspiracies they cooked up in their often drug-addled brains than any actual real-world organizations plotting widespread human sacrifice, or for that matter any actual widespread cases of child sex trafficking. That’s part of why absurd stories involving the Clintons, John Podesta, and basically every Democrat operative matter more to right-wing QAnon nutbags than anything the Order of Nine Angles and its offshoots do in the real world.
Screenshot taken from The Quietus, probably originally from a chan forum. This is the real Satanic conspiracy, not the QAnon or SRA bullshit.
In conclusion, to follow the same spirit as Aliakai, I’d stress that the problem isn’t Satanism, or the left hand path, or occultism or even demon worship. In fact, I don’t take the side of neopagans who insist that venerating the dark side of life is the exclusive by-product of Christianity, and I’ll definitely hang out with pagans who like to venerate “demons” in what is still a non-Christian context. The problem, to be quite specific, is E. A. Koetting, and the network of influence that he has created. Not only is Koetting a notorious con artist known for his dumb videos and equally dumb takes in his books, he also uses his books to advocate for a spiritual practice that is completely sociopathic and dangerous in that it encourages people who are serious about becoming gods to kill whoever they please, and his sphere of influence proved to be a space which cultivates the murderous desires of at least some of its inhabitants, and he himself likely has his fingers in the pie of esoteric fascism. Where Ford may be involved is that he too had his fingers in the same pie, and he and Koetting promote each other and are also part of the same network of influence within the left hand path, and although both may publicly denounced the O9A, it is suspected by at least some that there is more to such ostensible renunication than meets the eye, since those within the O9A who have ostensibly left are sometimes found to actually still be part of the O9A and fulfilling what are called “insight roles”. That means that both Koetting and Ford are part of what I can only describe as an esoteric conspiracy aimed at killing people as sacrifices in order to gain the power to become gods and bring their desired Aeon and their “Dark Gods” for the purpose of destroying democracy and replacing it with a kind of Nazi Satanist empire.
But does all of this mean anything for the left hand path as a whole? Well, for one thing, it means that the network shared by E. A. Koetting and Michael W. Ford has to be avoided like a plague, it must lose the influence and status that it has in the more popular representations of the left hand path. One thing you can do to ensure this is to stay away from Become A Living God and avoid giving E. A. Koetting any money, though that’s not exactly a big ask for most people, stop buying Ford’s books or anything from Luciferian Apotheca, and stay away from any of Ford’s projects, and unfortunately that includes the slowly growing Global United Nightside Movement and the Assembly of Light Bearers. You don’t know that these people aren’t still involved with the O9A, and so you don’t know that any money going to these people isn’t going towards the O9A or anything adjacent to it. In fact, in the case of Koetting you can at least assume that he’s going to spend your money on his drug habit. It’s pretty fucking painful for me to say because even though I like to think I’ve outgrown Ford in a number of ways, I have still had to credit his work with the course of my spiritual development insofar as the guidance of a dialectic between left-hand path-aligned spiritual content and latent paganism has been central to what I believe is my destiny. The thought that a guy like that may have turned out to be with O9A or ToB all along, thus playing a role in a large-scale conspiracy of sacrificial murder, and that he might not be telling the whole truth as to whether he’s still with them (or even was with them at all) is horrifying, but unfortunately that’s just how it is, and so in order to curb all of that, I have to tell everyone and myself that Ford can’t be dealt with or trusted anymore.
The other important rammification for the left hand path, I feel, is that it must find a way to redefine itself away from the kind of framework that is imposed upon it in modernity through a dynamic created by colonialist Christian culture and its esoteric manifestations. Simply put, we should surpass and retire the idea that the left hand path is what denotes spiritual egoism vs the right hand path emphasis on the Other. I find this especially pertinent because even left hand path belief systems ultimately have some kind of Other within them despite claims to the contrary (Koetting, for instance, talks about the Eternal). The Social Darwinism that is core to the baseline of Satanism is built to some extent on a form of egoism, and so long as Social Darwinism retains its place, fascism and its inherent violence are destined to be drawn to it, because they are aligned and not to mention joined at the hip (we should point out that Anton LaVey’s many friends and the Church of Satan membership have often consisted of fascists). But the left hand path has always meant more than this. Before the arrival of Satanism, even within the context of Tantric Hinduism, it has generally encapsulated transgression and the embrace of the flesh as a means of accessing the Sacred, or ultimate unity with God in the context of Hindu doctrine. I plan to delve into the subject of the meaning of the left hand path in a separate post, but I would again mention the way the Pagans at Gods and Radicals talk about the right and left of the Sacred, drawing from 20th sociology in the process.
The right aspect of the Sacred is concerned with purity, order, and the boundaries placed between Man and the Sacred. This is what corresponds to the Right Hand Path, which in the Tantric context of Dakshinachara is defined by the observance of ritual purity and taboos. The left aspect of the Sacred, by contrast, is concerned with transgression, not simply social transgression but also transgression of the boundaries between Man and the Sacred. This is what corresponds to the Left Hand Path, which in the context of Vamachara is defined often by the transgression of ritual purity and taboos. Rhyd Wildermuth makes the point that, in animistic cultures, rituals were performed in order to ensure the spirits and/or gods of their culture stayed within their respective world rather than enter the human world. Under such a framework, the goal of the Left Hand Path would be not to solidify some fallacious notion of a transcedent isolate intelligence as the sovereign ruler of the world, but instead it would elevate individual freedom, spiritual independence, the embrace of the “dark side”, and transgression of the boundaries between Man and the Sacred as part of a way to bring the individual self together with the Other, to elicit communion with the Sacred, with nature, with the unconscious, with experience of whatever might be called “divinity”, and thus leading humans to be whole and united with the sacred nature of life, rather than purify themselves to meet the absurdity of transcendence. Thus, instead of the modern left hand path’s emphasis on atomic individualism, and occasionally fascistic terror, as a way to cut off all bonds the individual has with the world and, in its own way, set out a kind of negative transcendence, this left hand path would seek to produce a holistic (while of course liberated) individual by marinating it in the mulitplicity of a terrific, numinous, darksome Sacred that connects said individual to the world instead of severing them from it.
I can’t stress enough how stupid all of this fascist and Aryanist bile being brooked in corners of the left hand path is. The Satanic esoteric fascists believe that they are manifesting a left hand of the sacred, when, if you think about it, even in the context of manifesting their willpower, what they manifest is absolutely fundamental in the context of a right-hand understanding of the sacred. The whole point of folkish faith, for instance, is to establish strict boundaries between the Sacred and humanity, to limit the way that humans and the Sacred can interact with each other, in this case through racial hierarchy (I’ll post Ocean Keltoi’s video on Folkism at the end to help illustrate what I mean). A left-hand understanding of the Sacred, on the other hand, invites us to transgress those boundaries, so that Man and the Sacred are ever directly linked to each other, perhaps even to the point that they come together as one. Rather than impose limits on the presence of the Sacred in the world of Man, it calls for the Sacred to pour, nay flood, into said world. Ethnic borders between Man and the Sacred tightly control Man’s interaction with the Sacred in the most absurd way possible. But then I suppose that even the right and the left hand paths are not totally adequate to explain some of these types, since, for all I know, all of it could be motivated by the desire to enact the apotheosis of some kind of racial will. For many esoteric Nazis, this entails purity and is thus an extreme expression of the right aspect of the Sacred, but for the Satanic version of this, purity is affirmed in the racial sense but also almost denied in every other sense, yet the boundary between Man and the Sacred is not transgressed, since it remains closed by ethnic boundaries due to the volkisch religiosity so often embraced by the Order of Nine Angles and its various offshoots.
Regardless, I am firmly of the belief that the left hand path cannot be defined by the kind of people whose inexorable direction is fascism, let alone murderous conspiracy in service of fascism. Historically speaking, it is not something that can be limited to something as narrow as the pursuit of the ego, and has not been so until the ascent of LaVeyan Satanism, and morally speaking, the consequences of limiting the left hand path to the frankly pathetic egoistic Social Darwinism too often pushed by what passes for Satanism is something that will only eventually lead to the destruction and emptiness of those who continue to pursue it, even if it does not ultimately lead to the deaths of innocent lives. We who aspire to the divine darkness of the left hand of the Sacred believe in our path because we see in it something beautiful and noble, and absolutely essential, that cannot be found in the delusions of transcendence and purity too often sold to the world as the one true religion. We should not allow this to be obfuscated and snuffed out, whether through the work of the evangelists of God’s “light”, or through the work of sinister and traitorous conspiracy.
I’ve already linked an archive of Tempel ov Blood’s Liber 333 in the text of this article, but I urge you to look at it anyway and see Michael Ford’s writings contained within it, and judge for yourself the nature of his involvement with ToB.
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.
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.
The latest lead relating to Jacob McKelvy concerns the “Empowerment” Conference. This conference seems to be run in CT Church, based in Houston, Texas, and is run by Pastor Don Nordin, who also runs CT Church with his wife Susan Hordin. The exact aim of these conferences is rather opaque, but from their website you can gather that’s essentially an expanded conversation on evangelical Christian teachings and give tips on how to run ministries. Their logo also seems to look like a rip-off of Enron’s logo for some reason. By an astonishing coincidence, both CT Church and Enron were based in Houston, Texas.
From what I have been informed, not much of Jacob’s involvement with the conferences remains, but there is some photographic evidence around. Below you will see a photo of Jacob at this conference, accompanied by Robert Hogan and Don Nordin.
It’s possible that this conference also contains a clue as to his activities following his arrest. Below you will see a close-up of the same photo.
The pair of pants or trousers that Jacob is wearing lift up towards the ankle area, as though portruding from the rest of the trousers. The possibility is that this would be suitable for concealing an ankle bracelet, which would have been fitted to Jacob’s leg following release from custody. After he was arrested, Jacob spent all of two days in jail before having $30,000 made by a bondsman, at which point he was released from jail pending trial and possible sentencing, which has since been delayed for four years now. Now, since he was in custody for only a few days, that would have been enough time for the evangelicals around him to have not yet figured out what we happening, for Jacob to come up with some sort of story to tell them about his misadventures and absence. But before long, Jacob would have needed attorneys to prolong his legal case in order to keep him out of prison, or eventually get his case dismissed entirely so that he can get that ankle bracelet off of him and be a free man again. This can become seriously expensive business, so Jacob would have needed money to keep paying the fees to keep his attorney’s services on hand. Eventually he would keep begging the evangelicals for money, and after giving him a chance at first they would eventually get sick of it and ask why he always seemed to be strapped for cash, at which point they may have figured out that he needed to keep paying attorneys to prolong a criminal case for his child sexual abuse charges, and then they would start shunning him afterwards.
There is, however, a problem. A close look at these screenshots shows a hashtag, #EC16, meaning Empowerment Conference 2016, the year before Jacob’s arrest, though I imagine not terribly long after his “conversion”, since these usually take place every September. Either they used an old powerpoint slide and forgot to update it for some reason, or this actually did take place in 2016, shortly after Jacob’s “conversion”. And to be honest, the latter date makes the most sense. If we go by the Empowerment Conference’s website, part of their enterprise involves supporting people in creating ministries. Jacob may have gone there to get some business tips before eventually incorporating the Jacob McKelvy Ministries proper. Not to mention, by September 2017, Jacob had already started the band Temple of Perdition under the name Ya’akov Nahash, and the evangelicals surely already scrubbed any references to Jacob some months after his arrest. Furthermore, if you look at the Twitter account for CT Church, they haven’t posted anything since August 2020 for some reason, but you’ll find promotional notices for Empowerment Conferences in 2017 and 2018, though 2019 and 2016 are absent from their feed. I can’t explain why the 2019 conference is absent, but the absence of 2016’s conference makes some sense. I’m told that all traces of the conference Jacob attended have disappeared. If I can still find evidence of the 2017 conference having been announced and taken place from CT Church media, but not the 2016 one, it’s logical to assume that it was the 2016 conference that was to be erased, not the 2017 one. Perhaps the trousers simply happened to be convenient for the ankle bracelet that would be fitted on him a year after the conference, and CT Church was simply doing what all the other evangelicals were doing in getting rid of all references to Jacob after the arrest, presumably after being contacted about the matter by either the Hogans or somebody else.
The last thing to note is that apparently there may be trolls coming from a website called “Our Spiritual Quest”, which features an article promoting Jacob’s conversion narrative and photographic evidence of the Empowerment Conference. If indeed there are trolls on that website, it would be best for me to use this archive link to refer to the article rather than draw their attention here with the real one.
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.
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.
Jacob McKelvy, seen here with his wife Michelle and Pastor Robert Hogan
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
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.
Aleph's Heretical Domain 
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