A GUIDE TO RUNNING A CULT (LARP) by Aaron Finbloom

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  • August 30, 2025

A GUIDE TO RUNNING A CULT (LARP) by Aaron Finbloom

​In the summer of 2025 the Deep Play Institute hosted 2 back-to-back long-weekend runs of a cult live action role play called, “Order of the Amethyst Heart.” In this fictional world, which takes place a few years into the future, the signs of a deteriorating society are getting more prevalent, and chapters of the Order of Amethyst Heart (a group devoted to worship of the inner ultraviolet) have been popping up around the world as a means achieving of spiritual and psychological liberation. The backdrop for our LARP was that worldwide Armageddon was so immanent that the only way to prevent it was to gather elected members from the various chapters around the country, and for us to combine our individual psyches into a collective oversoul. Pilgrims came from near and far to our chapter – the Cascadia Branch, a few hours from Portland – to undergo this challenging and vital ritual.

TECHNIQUES:

The style of LARP that we hosted was called a nordic LARP – because it was developed in Scandinavian countries (not because it is about Vikings). The style is known for being highly structured, and taking on serious content (not just elves and warlords, but AIDS epidemics and mental institutions for example). For our LARP weekend, we arrived on a Thursday night, and from then until Friday evening we workshopped out-of-character by going over safety rules, warming us up to the group, developing our characters, and learning some of the rituals that we were to take part in once the LARP began. Then from Friday evening until Sunday at 3pm the invitation was to stay in character the entire time. Players had a designated zone to chill in if they wanted to go out of character, but for the most part all 18 of us remained in character for 3 days. We slept in our humble quarters (tents), we ate together simple meals (as they do in monasteries), and we did all kinds of rituals and practices together to dissolve our egos and worship the inner ultraviolet (an energy field we believe to be held within all sentient matter).

The LARP was designed by myself (Aaron) and Denzolo. And each of us had a unique contributing role. Denzolo’s background was more within the realm of esoterica, magik, astrology, kundalini yoga, but also process oriented psychology. They were the leading voice behind the world we created, a world co-created from a wide array of real esoteric practices from the past few thousand years. Most notable this included a morning practice of mantras, the 9 rites, yoga, breathing techniques, and osho-style cathartic release. My contributions were more structural and psychological: thinking of the general arc of the weekend, the ordering of events, and activities centered around psychological exploration and depth (psychodramas, circling, group processes, etc).

Within the fiction we were using 5 elements to bring us towards the collective oversoul – a process named Spagyirca Pleromata. We began with earth as we gardened and tended to the earth. We then went into fire, a practice called Clearing, which is an emergent group-field offshoot of psychodrama that attempted to raise the psychological heat of the group and provide catharsis of our inner parts. Then we practiced water, and played Spaceship (developed by Ilana Simons), an authentic relating, surrealist sentence stem game that blasts participants off into murky relational interstices.  Then air as Denzolo led us through a Stanislav Grof inspired breath work session. And then the final ritual was a processession to a field whereby we led a circle of protection rite (calling in the 5 directions), then a wildness lab (a time to truly purge our psyches of all the dross of our parts), and then, blindfolded, the time was then around 10pm, we walked to a distant field where me and Denzolo (and a few notable helpers) had dug out a huge donut in the earth. The final part of the ritual was an initiation into the oversoul which called on us to donate a vital fluid into a collective chalice (blood, urine, spit, etc), for us to give up our personal identities, and then to lay in a collective symbolic grave, where we then buried ourselves in about 2-feet of soil, all symbolizing our dissolving, our becoming one. And again, all of this was in character.

Sunday was a strange and murky finish. We told participants in the workshopping day that we would be instituting a structural change after the burial ritual whereby we were encouraged to use “we” pronouns, rather than I pronouns, or to use non-worded sound to connect to connect to others rather than language. The hope was that these tools would help us dissolve into togetherness. Some of us felt more united than others. Others thought the ritual was a failure. We had a very wild group process on Sunday morning (inspired by process oriented psychology) whereby we stood in different parts of the room to represent different inner parts and played them out in an emergent unfolding. And then we ended the LARP with a unified dreaming/visioning activity, where all of us lay on each other in a circle under a huge old growth maple tree, eyes closed, dreaming into the future of our collective and world. We then took off our roles (i.e. exited our characters) and then after two hours of integration out of character the LARP was over.

WHY? / INTENTIONS?

From the website (i.e. what all our participants read upon signing up)

In our modern, western secular culture there is a lack of communal belonging that can hold both a devotional practice to the divine, and a wild, expressive transformative process of authentic embodied experience. So many of us are enchanted by the ideal of living with friends in the country. So many of us are enchanted by the ideals of radical community – an antidote to our radical western individualism. So many of us are begging for a deep immersion into the sacred, the natural, the divine – an antidote for our scientific secularism. And so many of us are needful of wild, authentic expression – an antidote for the stale, prescribed formalities of our culture. We want to create an experiential container (safe-enough space) to provide people access to these desires, not only as a means of giving our souls something that we desperately need, but primarily as a means of exploring and playing with vital existential questions. What is it to lose all sense of self? What is it to give up our psyches into the collective? To share in a wider set of bodies, beliefs, images? To disown our individual egos and to become part of something larger? Each other, nature, the divine? What fissures, fractures and frictions arise on this journey? How can we be with them, and how will they impact this process? What happens to us as we follow others towards behavior that has positive intentions, but whose means are edgy, challenging or dark? What happens to us as we lead others towards these places? 

ON REALITY & AUTHENTICITY

One of my biggest concerns throughout the two iterations of the LARP was on whether we were authentic or not. Many participants, including myself, had incredibly profound experiences and said at the end “that was amazing, but now I want to do it for real!” I.e. I want us to play this whole this thing now out of character. I.e. I want to start a real cult.

Was it real? Were we ourselves?

There was an ongoing resistance of pretense or pretending. Perhaps some people join a LARP to pretend. But like any good method acting coach may say, I’m not interested in pretending, I want us to feel as though what we are playing is really happening. And maybe my question is: is that possible? There were times when players were putting on accents, or telling jokes, or being somewhat absent minded about their character, moments where I was in disbelief about whether they were holding the world in a kind of serious regard. But even if players were trying to be serious, sometimes the seriousness was overwrought, sometimes a role was played too hard, the acting was too overdone and overly saturated with affect.

I began to think of character and authenticity in a few nuanced ways.

1- An authentic pathway into character, is to feel what is really being felt. For instance do you feel in your body rejection, or joy, or love, or disinterest. Start there. And then ask (with each authentic emotion) how would my character respond to this feeling. So character is a kind of sieve that all real emotions pass through.

2-  Techniques are vital that can have an effect on one’s body, i.e. that can inspire REAL emotion. The most notable one was perhaps breath work. There was no way to trick your way out of feeling the intensity of that practice. Perhaps also with the burial. There was no way to pretend your way out of that. Rituals or experiences that have a visceral entry-point are vital for bringing about realness.

3- Snowballing. My character was named Gideon. And to begin with I felt like I knew hardly anything about Gideon. Gideon had lived at the order for 15 years, and was devoted to the practices there, and was devoted to our guru Martaji (who passed away a few years back). And so very soon it became clear that Gideon was exacting, and severe, unflinching, and totally devoted to success of the weekend’s ritual because it was necessary for saving the world. This came out only through playing Gideon. It was almost as if the character revealed this to me.

4- Finding bridges between a character and your real self. The main way I tried to do this was with my core intention. Gideon wanted the ritual to work. But why was Aaron invested in the ritual’s success? This became clear after the first Saturday night’s burial, and through reflection on the meaning of Spagyrica Pleromata (a Peraselsian alchemical technique) which means to take a thing apart into its respective parts and then put it back together. I, Aaron, realized that our psyche (in our selves, in groups, in society) is polarized, but that a necessary way of healing is to dissolve these polarizations into thier individuated expressions (i.e. to truly play out and feel: father energy, mother energy, abandonment, savior, etc) and then hold those energies in the group field in order to bring them together. And so a bridge was formed between Aaron and Gideon in terms of a core intention.

Nonetheless, I still question what character does to group experience. What would our weekend have been like if we just called it, “A group ritual inspired by esoteric practices and western psychosomatic techniques.” Well, it doesn’t sound as catchy. It doesn’t have the same pull as “Cult LARP.” There is something really HOT about playing a cult. But what is that appeal? It’s the chance to play with serious edges. It’s a chance to play with things so hot that they are hard to touch. I like to think of characters as condoms. They let you do all kinds of risky things, but ultimately don’t feel as good as if you weren’t wearing one. Someone pretended to chloroform a participant who wasn’t complying with the ritual. Another person dommed me by forcing me to get on the floor and say how much of a shit I was. Neither of these would have happened if we didn’t have the crutch of character. Character lets us do things that are unimaginable. But it comes as a price. The price of a buffer. The price of distance from our real selves, real worlds and lives.

I keep wondering if I can have my cake and eat it too. And keep thinking that the key is perhaps within intention. What are the stakes? Why are our real selves here? If we can get on the same page about that, and if those intentions can somehow find a way into our characters, then maybe we can pretend in a way that feels unified in its seriousness.

Some of the most exciting moments of play are the moments where we can’t tell if we are playing or not. Where we can’t tell if what is happening is me, or my character. Where the walls that say “pretend” erode a bit, and we can’t tell what is going on. These moments are so exciting (perhaps sometimes too exciting, i.e. terrifying) because we lose a sense of identity, the wild uncontrollable force of divine play flows out of the container meant to capture it, and it breaks out, and plays us in ways we cannot contain. It is here that we truly play, because the play plays us, and in doing so we lose a sense of if we are really playing or not. I long for these moments. And I hope to create more containers where they can be co-created.

How to do that in the future? Would that look like another cult LARP, or a cult that isn’t quite a LARP? I don’t know. But perhaps I’m already on the pathway there.

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This statement marks a shift in our orientation. While the values we describe have been an undercurrent of our work, they’ve drifted in and out of our awareness alongside other, sometimes contradictory, currents. Through writing this statement we attempt to swim in this one more faithfully:

Some strains of Buddhism and psychoanalysis meet in an anti-capitalist critique pushing us to look at the nature of desire as an endless self-perpetuating cycle of attainment and loss. The marketing for a product explicitly or implicitly says something like, “if you buy this product it will relieve your suffering.” These promises fail to disclose the truth about desire, at best, providing bandaids, or temporary resting places along a journey. At worst, their marketing and our participation in the fiction of fulfillment perpetuates even deeper and more prolonged suffering.

We aspire to consciously uncouple from the logic of commodity in what we offer at DPI. We attempt to disclose the truth regarding desire itself: that it endlessly perpetuates, and that no material or immaterial substance given to our psyche will ever truly nourish us; we are hungry and insatiable.

Through this orientation, where commodity acquisition offers transcendence, we attempt to offer immanence. Like monotheism’s vision of the afterlife as a relief from the present, capitalist consumption dangles a more pleasant future just ahead. We design structures and rituals to sanctify the mess of the now.

Even as we attempt rigor in this regard, we constantly fall into traps of desire. It is endlessly tempting to read salvation into our offer to sanctify the messes of the present. As facilitators we too want to be saved from suffering, and we unknowingly bake that longing into our offerings and affects. The same unfortunate situation occurs within both Buddhist and psychoanalytic traditions, where students encounter the truth of each system as a salvific balm.

Our task then is to keep insisting that we will not heal you. That you are always broken. And that playing with your brokenness, our primary task, will ultimately fail as well. And that, as Pema Chödrön insists, real bravery is not about holding on to hope, but about allowing ourselves to touch hopelessness directly. That when we lean into our groundlessness, rather than scrambling to escape it, we discover a deeper kind of courage — the willingness to rest in the unknown. Can we hold that immeasurable loss? Can we at least touch this loss together? Can we play with it not by only offering lightness and buoyancy to it, but also by merely sitting with each other with our shrunken, bated breaths, as we encounter aloneness together? That is the kind of deep play we aspire to offer.

We, the leadership and facilitators of The Deep Play Institute, want to speak to what it means for us to hold authority in our programs. We want to acknowledge the lineages of what we are offering, as well as our ignorance of many of the branches of those influences. In this acknowledgment, we borrow heavily from the language of Hana Van Der Kolk in their facilitation of somatic practices. The methods we offer are only in small part influenced by our own creativity—they derive from a complex interweaving of teachings and teachers, who themselves are complex interweavings of teachings and teachers. We will name these teachers, lineages, and influences wherever we are aware of them. However, as Hana writes: “We recognize that colonization, white supremacy, and globalization have erased some of the clarity of influence. We will do our best to unforget in the context of a culture that actively produces ignorance.”

At DPI we see it as our responsibility to explore barriers to play—to explore the question of: “What makes play hard?” We work this question into the structure of our play so that we don’t miss out on the wisdom that’s offered by participants of various social identities, legacies, and landscapes of ability. People of different races, classes, ethnicities, ages, neurodivergences, sexual orientations, abilities, and genders may find particular play with particular people and leaders challenging in ways that reflect the impacts of their intersecting identities. Rather than orient toward these hardnesses as obstructions, we work to see them as opportunities to play more deeply and reverentially with one another’s perceptual gifts. The play becomes magical, political, and deeply experimental as it continually welcomes friction as an impetus for creativity.

We recognize that people from marginalized groups—whether due to visible or invisible identities such as race, age, ability, or disability—often carry a heavier burden in shared spaces, including our play spaces. For someone with relative privilege, it might feel brave to say something like, “I feel shy” or “I’m struggling to speak up.” For someone from a marginalized identity, however, speaking a simple truth—such as acknowledging the discomfort of being the only visibly disabled person in the room—might feel profoundly vulnerable—in large part because they might reasonably expect the dominant group to struggle to gracefully receive this. The challenges and tensions in these spaces are not evenly distributed, and there can be an illusion of equality when everyone is invited to “speak hard truths.” At DPI we are committed to exploring ways to reduce and cope with this inequity. We also believe profound creativity and resilience can emerge when people play with these tensions, and discomfort can be redistributed in ways that are meaningful and liberatory for all involved.

When friction arises during our workshops, we observe it through the lens of the inequities and dynamics we’ve described. In these moments, we improvise to understand the unfolding group process and learn from the experience rather than rigidly follow our original plans. This is much easier said than done, however, and we recognize that as facilitators, our various privileges and limitations can impair our skillfulness in navigating how to responsibly and reverentially hold authority. Sometimes, our own shame, resistance, and avoidance prevent us from seeing, let alone playfully encountering, these frictions. We see these moments as some of our most profound opportunities for growth and seek feedback throughout our programs to that end. We hope for your grace and patience as we continue to refine our practice.​