Drawn in by promises of astral travel and spiritual awakening, Lynn Short spent 17 years inside a cult that preached salvation through sex—so long as no one came.
When Lynn Short saw the Oregon Gnostic Society flyer on astral travel taped to a coffee shop wall in Portland in October 2001, she didn’t realize that it would change the course of the next 17 years of her life and lead her into a bizarre sex cult. That wasn’t what she was seeking. But she wasn’t exactly sure what she wanted, aside from guidance, a sense of security, and a paternal vibe that her emotionally distant father hadn’t given her.
Like many young seekers, Lynn thought Portland might have the answers. Lynn, who was in her early 30s, was floundering. She’d graduated from massage school but wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with her life. Learning about astral projection—the idea that your soul can separate from your body and travel—seemed to be as good a use of time as any.
She shared the flyer with her friend Justin, a professional cartoonist, and his girlfriend. He was interested; his girlfriend wasn’t. Justin called the number. A man named Dave* answered and told Justin that he was able to leave his body at will, and he could teach Justin the same skill. Justin thought it was worth going to a lecture, and he and Lynn went together. When they arrived, Dave insisted that he wasn’t a cult leader, just a missionary.
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That’s what all the Gnosis missionaries said: that they were just transmitting the messages of the cult’s founder, Samael Aun Weor, who was born in Bogota, Columbia, in 1917 as Víctor Manuel Gómez Rodríguez. When he was in his early 30s he renamed himself Samael Aun Weor. “He’s [claiming] he’s half divine and half human,” according to Joseph Szimhart, a cult information specialist who has been helping people leave cults since 1980. “He claimed he was Maitreya Buddha…the supposed incarnation of the final God during the Age of Aquarius that was predicted by Buddhists and Hindus.” By 1948, Aun Weor had a small group of students. By 1956 he’d moved to Mexico City to spread his beliefs.
Aun Weor’s religion, Gnosis, was a cult-like interpretation of gnosticism, which has existed since the first century. Gnostics “tend to believe that the world was created by some kind of a fallen deity,” said Szimhart. Gnostics usually believe humans are trapped in an evil physical matrix that they can escape through “direct knowledge of the divine,” said Smizhart. Gnostic groups were persecuted by Christians during the Inquisition. “Gnosticism teaches that the God that kicked Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden is the false god.… The true God is the one that inspired them through th[e] serpent,” Szimhart said.
Aun Weor, who looks vaguely like Frank Sinatra, must have had some sort of magnetism because when he began sharing his philosophy in the 1940s, people not only listened, they thought if they followed his teachings they too would be saved. And his teachings weren’t easy to follow. Aun Weor told his followers that for the rest of their lives, they could never have an orgasm. But they were supposed to have regular sex with their heterosexual partners. (Aun Weor rejected homosexuality). Though the belief may appear bizarre, Szimhart said it isn’t uncommon among cults. It’s an adaptation of a tantric belief. And requiring adherents to not have orgasm is a means of dominating them. “By telling everyone to withhold semen or orgasm, that’s a really powerful control mechanism, because most people can’t do that,” Szimhart said. “That kind of a directive is a means of control, because the person constantly experiences shame and guilt.”
Aun Weor, however, claimed that abstaining from orgasms was a spiritual practice based in sacred philosophy. He told his adherents that the power of the world is contained in people’s sexual energy or “seed.” But the only way to gain that energy was to abstain from having an orgasm, he wrote in his 60-some books. If you did so, you’d grow a sacred being inside of you and gain salvation and eternal life.
His teachings combined Christianity, Buddhism, kabbalah, and sex magic. “I call these things designer religions,” Szimhart said.
Aun Weor spread Gnosis through Central America and Mexico, where he died in the 1970s. Though he preached the no-orgasm life, he had five children.
Nobody knows how many people are currently in Gnosis. One former missionary I spoke to estimated there were up to 9,000 members around the world. A person identifying themselves as Kepheus, who works at Glorian, the publisher of Aun Weor’s books, said, “It is not possible to give an accurate estimate of the number of ‘followers’ worldwide. Certainly, millions of people have read his books in Spanish [but] in English the numbers are nowhere near that.” The group has outposts everywhere but Antarctica, Lynn said. In some South American countries practicing Gnosis is banned, according to former members, something some Gnosis sects explain away by saying those countries are demonic.
Glorian claimed true believers of Gnosis were rare. “Today there are a few sincere groups that study Gnosis, but sadly most are cultish, misled, or simply foolish,” Kepheus wrote. “That is why Glorian has nothing to do with any ‘groups,’ nor do we engage in evangelism, religious politics, or any type of cult of personality. Our mission is to make the teachings freely available as they were given, without the stink of personalities, politics, competition, cults, etc.”
Gnosis’s nonprofit publishing arm, Glorian, which produces podcasts, videos, lectures, and books, is small, but it has grown over 400 percent from 2015 to 2022. Still, it only had $384,068 in assets in 2022. As the size of the Glorian shows, Gnosis is not a cult that bleeds its members of money, at least not in the U.S. (some in the South American sects feel differently). But it does force ambitious members to pay for missionary training and to work for free, lecturing for hours and buying special shoes and dresses.
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When Lynn met Dave, she was instantly entranced. “[Dave] had a persona that was super authoritarian, and it tickled my father issues pretty hard,” she told me.
The group had a New Age, Buddhist-like spiritual practice that involved meditation and yoga, and a sense of community. It was just what Lynn was looking for. Besides, she didn’t think she was the type to be sucked into a cult-like group. She was a college graduate who believed she had strong critical thinking skills.
When Dave told her and Justin that they’d been drawn to the group because of all the “crimes and sins” they’d done in past lives, Lynn wasn’t taken aback. Neither Justin nor Lynn were aware that Gnosis was considered a cult. “There wasn’t a lot of stuff online about Gnosis, and the books were hard to get, and so we didn’t really know about the sexual teaching,” Justin told me.
For months, the two of them went to Dave’s courses, held in his one-bedroom apartment, where they learned about astral travel, lucid dreaming, kabbalah, and Buddhism. Initially Justin wasn’t sure if he wanted to stay with the group. But Lynn was hooked from the beginning. “I didn’t really want to be part of office culture,” she said. “And here’s this teaching that flops in my lap, and it’s, like, sold to us as the best, most important thing you’ll ever do.”
Soon Justin was on board. And Dave rewarded Lynn’s and Justin’s dedication by introducing them to a higher round of courses, which were focused on meditation. But soon Justin realized the courses weren’t as advertised. “There was nothing in that course that was about meditation. It was about preparing people for group ritual magic,” he said.
About five months in, Dave sat Lynn and Justin down for the “talk.” He told them there were three things that would make the divine mother inside of them unhappy, three things they should avoid: hate, killing, and having an orgasm. When Lynn heard the news, she was surprised but too deep in Gnosis to leave. “It’s such a weird shock to your system. It’s like, you don’t question it,” Lynn said.
This “sex magic” was the key to immortality. Not having an orgasm would nurture the trinity that every person has inside of them, consisting of the divine father, mother, and son. By not having an orgasm, you were reserving your orgasmic energy for God. Having orgasm-less sex activated the Muladhara chakra, which was located in your perineum, according to Aun Weor. “Whoever awakens this center totally acquires the Elixir of Long Life [and] conserves his physical body for millions of years,” Aun Weor wrote.
About four months later, Dave announced he was holding a three-day retreat. By this time Lynn and Justin were both single, so they attended it together. It was held inside Dave’s single-family home. Dave led meditation for 10 to 12 hours a day, mixing pranayama (yogic breath control) and mantras and silence. “By Sunday afternoon, I had a quiet mind and an open heart for the first time as an adult,” Justin said. “[I was] like, Oh my God, I found my purpose in life, and so I was pretty much all in after that.”
The group pushed them to find a sexual partner to practice their tenets with. If you were unable to find a partner, you were supposed to do a different practice that involved laying down and pretending you were an angry toad by making croaking noises and imagining your sexual energy moving from your genitals to your brain.
Soon after the retreat, Justin asked Lynn to be his wife. She said yes. They moved into Dave’s house (Dave had moved from his apartment to a three-story house where he lived with his wife). Lynn and Justin shared the basement apartment. Dave taught his classes on the floor above them in his living room.
Like most newly engaged couples, Justin and Lynn had regular sex. Unlike most, it was bad sex. “It’s not sexy sex, it is penis goes in vagina,” Lynn said. “You might move around a little bit, but you’re also, like, singing mantras, and your mental, emotional focus is on the crimes that you did that day.” Gnosis called this “sexual magic.” If you had an orgasm during your dreams, it was viewed as more of a sin than when you were awake because Gnosis believed you were closer to God when you were asleep.
Lynn and Justin didn’t know how to prevent orgasms. And Gnosis was no help. “In no place, anywhere in the organization, was anyone teaching anything about arousal control,” Justin said. Justin struggled to abstain from orgasm. “When I had a spill, I had to figure out a way to be okay with that,” Justin said.
They weren’t just supposed to stop having orgasms; they were also supposed to refrain from looking at people they found attractive. Gnosis is “an extreme form of purity culture,” Lynn said.
Lynn and Justin were told that sex was supposed to happen “slowly” and “softly” while they chanted mantras, including “Dis, das, dos.” Mantras were supposed to prevent them from orgasming. “The doctrine didn’t really mince words, like, hey, you better not fuck this up,” Justin said. “My attitude is like, Yeah, whatever. Let’s do this.”
In 2006, five years after they joined Gnosis, they were offered initiation into what Gnosis called “second chamber.” It was a secretive place they’d only heard whispers about. The leader told them to acquire vestments: a blue robe with a white rope and black leather sandals. Lynn and Justin spent hundreds of dollars hiring a costume maker and shoemaker to get the garments and sandals just right.
On initiation day, Lynn and Justin entered the chamber, which was a separate room in Dave’s house. Inside the black-and-white carpeted room was an altar draped with maroon and white fabric, a staff with three spheres atop it (representing the trinity), wine vessels, swords, candles, a rooster sculpture, and a Rosicrucian cross tacked to the wall. As was the custom, Lynn and Justin were blindfolded and informed that they would experience the four elements of the world. “I wasn’t worried that I’d be having to deal with an Eyes Wide Shut scenario and an orgy,” Lynn said. “No one had sex. It wasn’t like that kind of a weird sex cult.” The ceremony involved exposure to fire, water, earth, and air. A flame was placed near their faces, their hands were dunked in a bowl of water, and wind was blown in their face. “It felt very unnerving to have to be blindfolded and they would point swords at you and be like, If you betray us you will die the worst death,” Lynn said. They knelt in front of the altar and placed their hands on a Bible.
Lynn and Justin carried on, moving into a third chamber where you were supposed to pray multiple times a day to tamp down your 12 major sins, five more than Christianity. Then they’d confess their sins among the group.
Lynn and Justin learned that if you moved through all the chambers, you were told you “became like Jesus, fully awakened, like a god on earth,” Lynn said. There was an urgency to following these beliefs because the ending of the world was nigh, Gnosis leaders said. And if you didn’t follow the tenets you would go to hell when the rapture happened. “They don’t tell you this in the first class, because Justin and I would have fucking bailed,” Lynn said.
After about six years in the organization, in 2007, Justin and Lynn were invited to become missionaries. Justin was excited; Lynn didn’t want to go, but she reluctantly went because the leader guilted her into it. A Costa Rican branch of Gnosis offered to train them. Justin maxed out his credit cards to pay the $1,500 for three months of training. He and Lynn also worked a job in Costa Rica. But, he insisted, Gnosis wasn’t “a money-grubbing organization.” During training they meditated four to six hours a day when they weren’t working or practicing the pre-written lectures they were supposed to memorize. “At one point our international director said we needed to stop sleeping and just meditate all night, every night,” Justin said.
Soon after he returned home, Justin abandoned his passion of cartooning and stuck with his day job as a truck driver. “I didn’t need to get a sense of identity from my job anymore.… Truck driving didn’t take up a whole lot of space on the hard drive of my mind. I was free to listen to retreat lectures,” he said.
After completing their missionary training, Lynn and Justin returned to Portland and led a division of Gnosis. To proselytize, they’d go from coffee shop to coffee shop, taping up flyers advertising their talks—the same flyers that Lynn had seen years earlier. “We were pretty ineffective, because neither one of us had that authoritarian edge. I just wasn’t going to teach people that they should be ashamed of themselves,” Lynn said.
Classes were open to the public, at least the “first chamber” classes were, so they’d call the courses a variety of names to attract different types of people. “Astral travel would attract people in the Wiccan crowd. But if you call the same course Dream Yoga, you get a whole different crowd,” Justin said.
Around this time, seven years into the Gnosis group, Justin was able to reliably prevent himself from having an orgasm. “I stopped having spills physically. It kind of crossed over into the dream state,” Justin said. “There’s a certain point where, when you’re trying to not have an orgasm, it ceases to be pleasurable when you do have one.”
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In 2012 Lynn and Justin moved to Spokane, Washington, to open a new branch of Gnosis. They were familiar with the area because they’d been visiting an incarcerated Spokane man who had written to them saying he wanted to learn Gnosis. Eventually, the man asked them if they would become chaplains at the prison. They liked the idea and applied to the Washington Department of Correction to have Gnosis recognized as an official religion. Gnosis was accepted.
Justin and Lynn began teaching Gnosis at two medium-security prisons in the area. “We couldn’t do second-chamber stuff, but we could talk to them about questioning [their] anger, which probably isn’t a bad idea in prison,” Lynn said. Justin said that unlike his students outside the prison, his prison students actually read the Gnosis books. “A question I kept getting from those guys is, ‘Hey, we’re really on board with what you’re teaching us here, but the stuff in the books, like, that’s a whole different world.… How do you defend this?’” Justin recalls them saying. “I don’t,” he replied. “I think it’s bullshit.” He began to question his beliefs.
As Justin had gained mastery of his orgasms, Lynn was sliding in the other direction. Around 2012, after she moved to Spokane, she started having orgasms during penetrative sex. She tried to resist them, but she couldn’t. “Sometimes they were incredibly painful to have, because emotionally, they’re painful. And I’m like, oh my God, I’m doing the cardinal sin,” she said. She asked the leaders what she should do. They said she could do breathing exercises, and that the orgasms were her fault because she didn’t love the divine mother enough. She remembers leaders telling her that “Your ego wants this to be happening.” They said she had to “look inside herself” to find the part of herself that wants the orgasm. “And I’m like, I’m looking, I’m not finding it,” Lynn said. Meanwhile, Justin felt like he was learning how to control his emotions around sexuality in a healthy way. Lynn “will come around,” Justin thought. “We’ll work it out somehow.”
Lynn was nearing her breaking point. She began asking questions about the faith. The leaders wouldn’t answer her. “You need to live in your heart and not use your brain,” her leader told her.
Then one of their spiritual leaders, who claimed he was a god on earth, told them that New York City would sink into the ocean in 2015. “Part of me was, like, waiting for 2015 to end because I was like, if that happens, I am so a Gnostic.… And so when it didn’t happen, it broke a little thing in me,” she said. But Lynn stayed in the group. Their leader said New York hadn’t sunk because Gnostics were doing such good work on Earth that “the angels intervened.”
About a year later, Lynn heard rumors that the Portland Gnosis leader who had taken their place was sexually abusing and raping women. A member of the Portland Gnosis group, Kathy*, who had learned Gnosis under Lynn and Justin, told me the new leader “could talk for hours about things he didn’t know anything about and hypnotize you. He had that cult leader way of talking that makes you kind of just, like, lose track of your own thoughts.”
The leader took a sexual interest in Kathy even though the leader had a girlfriend who lived at the cult’s house. “The second time I met him, he was like, ‘Could you imagine what it would be like if we were together?’” Kathy told me. “‘Our beings are so strong, we should join forces and be together.’” He told Kathy that she was the reincarnation of a Gnosis guru.
Kathy wasn’t the only person he was pursuing. He was also going after Kathy’s friend, a “stunningly beautiful, tall, voluptuous” woman who rarely spoke. Kathy recalled the leader telling his girlfriend, “The being has spoken to me. I’m meant to be with [another woman].” His girlfriend left in the middle of the night. Within a year or so Kathy’s friend was pregnant. She moved into the cult house and continued to live there with her baby. One day her friend confided to Kathy that she’d been pregnant before, and the leader had pushed her down the stairs and caused her to miscarry. Soon he began sleeping with another cult member, and Kathy’s friend and the baby were kicked out of the house. But he continued to pursue Kathy, who was having marital problems, which she was confiding to him about. His solution: having Kathy move into his house. She declined.
Another woman confided in Lynn that the new Portland leader was having sex with her, to supposedly rid her of her ego. He told her that the sex would prevent her from going to hell. The woman went to Dave, Lynn’s and Justin’ former teacher, for advice and therapy. Dave told her that the sex was partly her fault because of her bad karma. He also told her she was seducing the cult leader. Lynn confronted the leader and told him that he needed to come forward and admit what he’d done wrong. He refused. “I am doing good work. I am helping these students awaken,” he told her. Lynn and Justin told other leaders they wanted to fly to Portland and help get their former students away from the abusive leader.
“We were going to go down and we were going to scoop them up and hug them and scream and cry and rage with them,” Lynn said. But leadership told them not to get involved, and to have no further contact with their students.
The international coordinator became aware of the situation. Instead of firing the new teacher, he wanted to move him to a Gnosis community in another city. “That’s kind of a Vatican solution, don’t you think?” Justin said. “It was just like any other high-control group, you know, let’s blame the victim. Let’s brush it under the rug,” Lynn said.
The teacher did end up being let go after the group took a vote and decided he needed to leave.
And soon Justin recognized that Lynn was really suffering. He saw her pain and saw how the leaders had no way to fix it.
One day in 2017 or 2018. Lynn and Justin were having sex. “Hey, you’ve got to slow down. I think I’m going to have an orgasm,” she told him.
“Maybe I want you to have one,” he replied.
She had one. He did too. “We can probably do this for a while, and then we’ll get back to sexual alchemy, [not having orgasm],” he said.
“That’s where I took a little swan dive off the wagon and started having normal sex with Lynn for the first time ever,” Justin said. “I don’t know how many years there were—kind of like being newlyweds.”
They remained in Gnosis, however, until they heard that a woman was being raped by her leader in Seattle.
“And I was just like, You know what? I’m done,” Lynn said. “And if you guys can’t see how this is a line, I can’t be with you people anymore.”
She left Gnosis in July 2018. Three months later, in October, she posted a picture of the book she was reading, Leave the Cult, on Facebook. “I guess this is my life now,” she wrote underneath it. Some people could have interpreted the post as denouncing Gnosis as a cult, one Justin was still active in. “You realize you just outed me as a cult leader on Facebook, right?” Justin commented. Lynn and Justin had a laugh about it. A week later Gnosis’s international director sent one of his semi-regular emails to Gnosis leaders. As usual, he went into great detail warning about the end of the world. At the bottom of the email, he added a new message: all missionaries should stop contact with Justin and Lynn. That’s when Justin realized he’d been kicked out.
“The whole community ghosted me until about six months later, a guy who went through the missionary course with us, he called me up and he said, ‘Hey, I’m so sad you’re going to involution,’ which is like the Gnostic version of hell,” Justin said.
Lynn became involved with a Gnosis Reddit group and spoke to other members of the cult. She discovered that in Australia similar sexual abuse allegedly had happened, and a woman in Gnosis had killed herself in 2024 partly because she was trying to “die spirituality.”
Kathy left Gnosis in 2017, after an orgasm-less decade with the group. Six months after she left, she was sitting in her car and decided that she wanted an orgasm. She downloaded an app that causes your phone to vibrate more intensely. “And I just, like, put my phone in between my legs, just barely. It was like, through my clothes, and it wasn’t even directly in contact with my clitoris, and three seconds later, boom. It was the most, like, insane orgasm,” she said.
It’s been over six years since Lynn left Gnosis. Lynn and Justin remain married and are in weekly therapy. She still feels guilt about having recruited people, so she and Justin have reached out to their former students and apologized. They have struggled to readjust to life outside of the cult. “I’m suddenly facing a lost sense of purpose and identity issues, and I was in rough shape for a bit there,” Justin said. He got into ultra-distance cycling. Lynn recently burned her vestment. On the Samael Aun Weor Cult subreddit, she posted a picture of the blue robe going up in flames. “Call me an apostate and I’ll gladly claim the title,” she wrote. –HALLIE LIEBERMAN
| *Editor’s note: The person referenced as “Dave” is a pseudonym. Lynn was afraid to mention her cult leader by name. |
All Images Courtesy Of Lynn Short
