It is all about energy theft, the concentration of power, and then padding the magickal odds in your favor... the issue is that most cult leaders are either broken, damaged, or being twisted by something claiming to be "the devil." Any spirit, demon, faery, etc with a chip on their shoulder claims to be the devil or working for the devil or a minion of the great old ones. In the end, it is a petty spirit or person that is twisting the belief of others so that they may hold their attention long enough to co-opt their personal reality. Belief shapes reality. and when groups of creatures with advanced enough brains get together they all collectively form the reality around them through a sort of silent unspoken democracy. These beliefs define the ruleset that quantum mechanics builds reality. I imagine there is something even smaller/finer than QM but that is what we currently have to work with. So the cult leader alters and retrains the cultists to think like they do, allowing them to act like a super-hermit, they have all of the cult's attention and are the 'soul' arbitrator of reality when surrounded by the faithful. In the case of many saints of the Judeo-Christo-Islamic faiths, this happened without the saint actually intentionally manipulating for control. Traditional Wiccan circles with a High Priest or Priestess use this intentionally to create a cone of power and then embody all of that power in a person that has great skill with directing the energy.
Now step back for a moment from the weird in the world and see how religions and politics have used this loophole for eons to exploit those people who did not know. The Big Four Religions (Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism) all have active campaigns against mysticism and science, both of which can potentially lead a person to the hidden (Occult) truth that we really do create reality.
Finally, there are loads of magickal folk in America, 80+% of them are just people with folk beliefs that want to live their lives in peace. The rest in my experience are a split of about a 1/3rd Actively protective and defensive magickal folk who see themselves as shepherds of the uninformed and the other 2/3rds are self-serving in various ways, shapes, and forms. Mind you this does not make them evil, devil worshippers, or plotters of the death of Christian babies. Yes, some are, but the up-point is that strangely 'evil' in every form I have experienced at least, is pretty close to self-regulating between the control freaks and those who would shank a little old lady for her food stamps.
In Servitio Somnii
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Modeling Reality: A New Magickal Paradigm
Non-Fictionnon-cohesive book on the art of magick
