Ep. 243: I Didn’t Know I Was in a Cult Until I Left

And I just turned around and I call ass out of there. I was done. I wasn't deal with that. The hypocrisy of the cult is one of the things that turned me. Away the quickest. When I turned my head lights on, it turned and looked at us. And one of the things I remember the most where the eyes were going red. I see an orb of light. It is just circling these steps. Like it is waiting for me. And he begins to tell them that he saw a UFO. They're basically like, what are you talking about. That's seven foot up on a tree, peeking around it, and that's where I saw the top of the muzzle noose and the eyes as soon as I made eye contact this thing and don't like death. Welcome back to Tinfoil Tels. I'm your host, Brandon and I were joined by my guest Melissa. Melissa, thanks for coming on here and talking with me. Thanks for having me. Would you like to let the audience know a little bit about yourself. So my name is Melissa Sif your daughter. I am the founder of a fragrance brand called Stiff Sniffs, and I started it because I was in a witch cult. Oh, I know, there's a lot to this. But before we get into the whole cult thing, was this something that you just kind of fell into or is it something that kind of progressed you to go down this pathway that turned you into like joining this covenant cult. So right before the pandemic, I moved from Brooklyn to Connecticut and then literally it was March seventh, and my husband did his commute into the city three times before everything got shut down here in like the Greater Tri Street stri Tri State area, and. I was very isolated. We had moved into like this housing complex and I met one of my neighbors on movin day and that was it. So I went from being surrounded by people all the time just anytime I walked out of my house in Brooklyn to nobody leaving their house. And I went online and I took a ton of classes. I like was doing a PhD at this point. I was taking like meditation classes. And there was a witch shop in Brooklyn called Catlan Books, and they had a bunch of classes online and I was taking tons and tons of them. I was taking pretty much every class that Catland offered. And Lux was one of the teachers of the Norse stuff through Catland and she ended up becoming my cult later. So I think the isolation from the pandemic definitely led me in, like directly into the cult. Now, how many people were else were in this cult? So it started off I kind of started the cult inadvertently, like I just wanted to be taught a certain kind of Norse magic that Lux talked about. And said that she knew. So I was like, Okay, cool, I think I'm already doing this, so I want to learn a little bit more about it. And she took me on individually as a student. Once she got familiar and like comfortable with teaching me, she brought on two additional students and we maxed out at four. So now the cult is still going and last time I checked it, it still has the three people that were in it when I. Left, so it was not a big cult. It's just the three the four of us. There's a lot of different aspects to how people define a cult. So if you have information as to like why you're calling it a cult, because I know some people. When I think a cult, I think of clearly like everyone drinks the kool aid and you're waiting on the comment to come flying over or like the Jim Jones things like, But that's not what all cults are, and the common person is going to think like what I just describe. But there's definitely different levels of what cults can be. So what to think this was a cult? Like being involved in it. I left the cult because I was miserable, And it was after I left the cult that I'd have conversations with friends of mine, be it people in the pagan community, people who just knew me from other things, and everybody was telling me that, like, some of the things that Lux and the rest of the group did were extremely manipulative. And that's where I start to say it's a cult. If it was just and we'll get there doing drugs in the woods and talking to gods, I'd still probably. Be in it. But once it started making this transition over to isolation with other people what I can and cannot do, that's where things start to get culty. The main academic framework is the byte model, which is by Stephen Hassen, who recently came under a little bit of scrutiny. But bite is behavior, so it's when a group controls your behavior. I is information, how you get and receive information, T is thought control, and then E is emotional control. So all four of those things were done to me in the cults. There's also other definitions, like Johnny al Walich has like an eight point I think it's eight points that cults have to have at least most of them, but not all of them. Like I wouldn't say that Lux was particularly charismatic. She would often tell me that people who met her said that she seems like a hard ass. So things like a charismatic leader didn't apply to my cults. But there's other aspects of like lifestyle control and thought control and what you could and cannot do. We're all a big part of being in my cult. Do you think these people that are still in it realize that they're in a cult? No. I didn't realize when when I was in it. It was only when I. Left that I was like, oh, oh shit, I was in a cult the whole time. I wonder how often this happens to people, that they don't realize that they're involved in something that doesn't seem like a cult. And not to point fingers at specific religions or whatever, but I think a lot of specific religions can be traced back to being a form of a cult because a lot of it is manipulation and mind control and emotion controls, and they try and dictate what people can and can't do, and they keep them all under their thumb. And to me, most cults seem to stem from some sort of religious background involvement in as as it starts anyways, because at least the ones that most people know, there's some sort of afterlife aspect to it. Someone either communicates with a god or someone communicates with some other super high intelligent being or something to make themselves seem like they are more important than the rest of the followers, Like this person is the chosen person to lead them now the person that you were following. What makes them I guess it's weird to ask it this way, but what makes them the cult leader? Like? Are they the charismatic person that gets people to follow them or how do how does that work? So she was definitely not all that charismatic. I think. The big thing with Lux is that she just had so much experience in nor stuff. To kind of dial it back a little bit, I have been one type of pagan or another since I was about sixteen, and the Norse pagans in particular are kind of the weird stepchild, kind of off in the corner because most tend to be Hellenic, which is like the Greeks and the Romans, Celtic, and the Norse ones are often overshadowed by this little thing called white supremacy and a lot of nourse, iconography, belief systems, like symbols, everything has been co opted by white supremacists. So even in the pagan community, the nurse are always kind of like off to this side. They also don't tend to have the same. Practices as some of the other pagans, so that can also make them a little bit different. For instance, like Lux would constantly call herself a heathen, not necessarily like a particular pagan, and she definitely wasn't Wigan or anything like that. She would always identify as a heathen. What will a heathen be like? When I think of the term heathen, it gets thrown around here as like a derogatory term to saying someone's like kind of a piece of crap or doing something wrong or a bad person. There's even like a song for it, right. All right, Yeah, So what is their version of it. I think heathens are more of just the Norse reconstructionist pagan right. Lux was always very big on reading academic literature and seeing what like anthropologists and linguistics, Like, yes, anthropologists, and what are linguistic professor's call? Anyway, I'm having a dumb moment because it's nine o'clock and I drove twelve hours today, But people who study languages, I'll just put it that way. She was constantly reading academic literature trying to understand and recreate Norris magic systems as accurately as she possibly could to the way that they were practiced in like eighteen or eight fifty. So that was like a big thing for her. So she was. Big into making that her whole life of studying this, understanding this, and then trying to put it into actual practice. And that's why me and the other two girls, well, I can't really speak for them, but at least for me, I know, I signed up up to work with her and be taught by her because she knew all of that stuff already, whereas I knew a lot of other stuff that wasn't necessarily the whole hardcore academic study of it. How long were you involved in this? For I started taking individual lessons with lux in twenty twenty one and then I left three years. Later, so not that long. I'd been taking classes with her starting in November of twenty twenty, but it took her a while to take me on as a student. Did everyone live together or were you still off in your own living spaces? I had it all at work. We all had our own houses. I had a husband, one of the other girls had a husband. Like we all lived separately. But what would happen is after two years of working with her individually and her trying to get me to quit doing my masters, we all got together in real life and it was in like this airbnb and that's when we kind of like came together for the first time. So when you're involved in this, like what all were your guys doing during this time? Like what were you just studying with her or was there anything else going on involved in that? So it was studying with her. It was once a week and it cost ninety dollars, which was still boils mynards. But we would meet with individually. We could not talk to the other people about what we're learning in the individual lessons. And then she would. Go over kind of how the Norse magic that we were learning called Spotcoona or called SPA, how that worked and how it applied to our lives, but kind of from jump. A lot of the tasks that I had to do in order to like advance my spot my SPA training were things like limit your contact with your family to ninety minutes per week. There was also stuff like record conversations that you have with family and friends. Things like that that were not necessarily like witchy or like meditate or make a petition to this god, but really cross the border into like what I was doing in my personal life. So it sounds more like to me that she was basically trying to dictate everything outside of stuff that she shouldn't be involved with. Yes, for sure, but it was very breadcrumbing. Like in the beginning, it would be like small things, right, things like oh, limit your contact with your family, right, And then as things went on, it would be don't you understand that your job is pulling you away from things that you're really passionate about, so why don't you quit your job? What was her end game for all of this? Did she have one? Or is it just are you not sure? I don't one hundred percent know if I had to, like guess, I think that she just wanted She had the name for the cults before she had met any of us, Like she knew she wanted a group of which is called a spate, that she wanted a s Fate, and that we would be called hath Sire, and she really wanted like she knew the name, she knew everything ahead of time. So I think that like once she got us, it was the completion of something she had wanted for such a long time that she was going to hold onto that for dear life. And because she had had this idealized version of what it was, because she'd wanted it for so long, she forgot about the people in it. Like I became less Melissa awesome sauce, cool person and more Melissa member of Hathsire, And because of that I had to she wanted. To kind of like hold on to me a little bit. Harder the other ones that are still involved, was it, Do you have any Have you not had any communication with any of them since you left? Nope, they'll blocked me when I left. Are you still in the same area that you were or have you moved since then? No, I'm still in the same area. But one lived in Jersey and two of them lived in Queens, so I don't go to I've of those places all that often. Okay. So I know in your original message and stuff, you talk about doing like you have a business where you do perfume and this kind of started from the cult. Is that correct? Yeah? So everybody in the cults except me, had like a thing that they made. One of the girls was a baker, the other one made candles, lux made jewelry. She also did like infused honey. And we would get these like quote unquote paid gigs. I put it in air quotes every time because we didn't really get paid, but we would always have like a homesteading gift. So when we came to a person who was quote unquote paying us, we would give them a gift. And I was the only one who didn't make something that was consumable. And I remember just kind of being like, yeah, because I have like a full on ass career as a therapist, I'm not like, what do you want like a therapy session like that. I could give that that's something someone can consume, But like I don't. I'm not a crafty person. I didn't cry when Joe Anne's went out of business, like that's not my vibe. And but I'd had all of these ideas for perfumes, and B, who is now my podcast co host on Silogon Sorcery, B had already had. Like a witchy perfume company. I was like, I'm not going to do something that's going to directly conflict with B. But oftentimes, or at least my experience in the cults, and from what I've heard from other cult member stories, they experience the same thing where you get kind of like it's constant, like you get the same message. Over and over and over again. And one of the things that Lux would do is she'd give me a Roune reading and she'd be like, oh, the ruins are saying that you need to lean into having a business and being your own boss. And the Tarot cards are saying that you need to lean into a business and be your own boss, and you should have to make perfume. And this is saying then everything is saying that you need to make perfume. And when you hear that repeatedly from every direction, because now the other girls in the group were my only friends because everybody else has been cut out. I'm like, all right, well, I guess this is the sign and I'm just being I'm being stubborn, I'm being the problem. So then I started a perfume company. What kind of perfumes? Like, is it just like ladies perfume or is it just sense or like, what what is it that you're selling? Well, one of the things that I say is that I made a super masculine perfume called Thorsday, and my first bottle went to a girl. And I made a super girly perfume called phrase Kiss, and that one went to my first bottle went to a dude. So if you like it, you like it. I'm not going to tell you what to do with. Your life, right, And I will say every single fragrance has been bought by every single gender. So in general, I call it perfume because the art is called perfumery. But all of my like branding and stuff also fine fragrance because there's no gender involved in fragrance. But yeah, I will say, like everything's been bought by everybody. I have some that are like more traditionally masculine leaning but everybody loves them. I have some them. We're traditionally female leaning, and everybody loves them. So as we're recording this, you were an event in Indiana yesterday? Is that correct? Yep, I was in Indiana yesterday. I drove home today. And when you do these events, how often are you traveling around for them? Oh? I travel at least twice a month to other states. I'm constant. Every weekend, I'm going somewhere. It's just how close or how far I'm going. I know. Like from the listener's perspective, especially when you talk about like being in a covenant and teer into a cult and things, a lot of people that listen to the show could be somewhat a little hesitant just because of the whole witchy thing. This isn't something that you would consider like anything bad for people. Know. I'm just trying to make it like if the person that listens to the show super religious, they're like, oh, I can't take anything from a witch. Like it's not anything like that, is what I'm trying to get across, Like it's not anything witchcrafty or anything. No. I think like, is it inspired by stuff? Sure? Is it inspired by life, Like I have a scent called Chimelio, and Chimelio means heirloom in Italian and it's an honor to like my Italian ancestors. So I find inspiration from everywhere. I have a cent called the Hobbit, which if j R. J R. R. Tolkien's estate, excuse me, bring it on and I'll just change the name. And I'm glad that I got that famous enough to be on the radar. But I kind of take it from everywhere in my life. It's not just like specifically witchcraft related. Is there a lot of witchy themes and I do a lot of like gothic events and witchy events, absolutely, but that doesn't mean like you have to be a witch to wear them. Do you think that because of your influence in your background and everything else, this has some sort of influence to what you're doing now, like far as like with the perfumes and everything is just like you're still your way of being in tune with that side of your beliefs. I so, I was a therapist for a very long time, but I didn't event recently and my old boss came and visited me, and when she was leaving and she gave me the hook goodbye. She said, I'm so proud of you for living your dream. And it's because during my interview, she asked me what my dream job was, and I remember being like, besides this, because like I still wanted to get the job. I said, being a perfumer in France, because I thought like, even though I knew Bee and like Be was doing perfumery, I thought if you wanted to be legit, you had to live in France. So when she came to the event I was at and saw me with all of my perfumes, she was like, you're living the dream, like you're living your ideal career. So I think there's been a part of me that's always wanted to be a perfumer. I just didn't think that it was available as an American because American perfumery, even though it's been around for literally since our inception, we're not one hundred percent known for our perfumery. So I. Still thought I needed to go to France in order to become a perfumer. Oh, if anything, being a therapist was the detour, and that was like my realistic I need to think about having a real job, and I can't just think about living in the Cote des Or in France and making perfumes. How you said you're a therapist for a long time, Like not, this is not like throwing insults or anything. But if you're a therapist and you got involved in a cult, how does that work for people that have been involved in these things? Have you seen this situation from firsthand? Now? Like, how would you go to toddle someone that they're in a cult? You know what I mean? Oh, I was a therapist pursuing a second master's in victimology to work specifically with cult victims, and I stopped doing my second masters because Lux told me I was burnt out. So in a sense, she was almost like a therapist towards for you in a weird way. Oh, for sure, a lot of those individual sessions that I was paying ninety bucks for felt very similar to therapy and less of witchy training. And I think that that's part of her manipulation tactic, at least for me. Once again, none of us were able to talk to each other about what we were learning in those individual sessions. But for me, I will say I think by framing it like therapy, something I already knew, already had experience with. That's how she like slowly did her manipulation to get me more and more involved. I wonder how often like this happens to people like not obviously, if it happens to you, it could happen to anyone. But I wonder how many people get involved with someone else as they think is they're trying to help them, but that person is actually just there to manipulate them. And I'm not throwing shade at therapist Renim because I think everyone out there is trying to do something for good, But like maybe the people that talk to people like maybe, do you think she understands that what she's doing is manipulation or you think she's actually doing it with her own good intentions. I think she's one hundred percent doing it with her own good intentions, so. She doesn't realize that she's actually being harmful rather than better helping people. In our like on the podcast, we talk to a lot of other perfumers who are all American because we can we have access to them. But one of the. Ingredients we talk about and get frustrated by really easily is lavender. And lavender is. Very powerful, but like you wouldn't think it would be powerful, and it can tend to overl of fragrance by like helping too much. And every time I think of lux, I think of Lavender. She is that same idea of like I am helping and you need my help, I'm gonna just help you as much as I can. And it's like. It's your interpretation of help, and it's your interpretation of what is wrong with me or needs to be fixed. There are a lot of people who would see me having a great career with a great relationship and like a very stable on the outside looking life and just be like, yeah, Melissa's great, but she saw that and saw that as something that needed to get fixed. I just kind of wonder, like if the people are still involved with or if they're still pain her, because what else? What does she do else? Is this like her full time gig is to help people or do what she's doing, or she got something else that she does too. Oh no, she did a full full last job. I want to say it was marketing. Don't quote me on that because I'm not one hundred percent sure. She was always kind of caachy about it, but she did have a full time job. None of the other two had a full time job. The other two only made their money from being a baker or making candles. I know of someone that used to make candles around this area, and I don't think they had any sort of wicking or takeing witchy background or anything of she's them making candles or whatever, but just from you being involved in perfume and obviously this situation that you're in. Is it common for people to have some sort of like background and like a covenant type of aspect to this or is this just something that is more random just because of something that you were involved with. I think that was just because of what I was involved in also personally, And this is like my my tinfoil hat theory is I think that. Lux was. Really wanted us to have our own companies, because if we had companies, we would be reliant on one another. Like for instance, the moment I left the group, I lost a bunch of events for me to sell my perfumat And the first event I ever sold my perfume at literally I shared a table with one of the other girls in the group and Lux was in the room as well, so it was kind of the three of us all selling our wares, and we had gotten cookies from the one who baked stuff too, So it was all three of us in a room selling our wares, and. I think like that was the endgame. At least my interpretation was if we were all if we all had companies and we all had to do events together, then we were all reliant on each other and it would be a lot harder for us to leave because then we would be financially dependent on staying in the group. I guess that makes sense if you're trying to keep people around that you'd want them to be all doing something together. That way, it keeps them all financially locked in with her, so she has some lot of control over that. Maybe she's just a control freak and doesn't realize that she's projecting it out to be a cult leader. I mean, there's definitely someone who would love to hear that and would love to get that feedback so that they could tell it to Lucks when they're sitting on the couch across Or. Do you think because you said you did, what's your podcast called. I guess, before we get too much further into it, you say you do a perfume podcast, But what is it about other than just the perfumes? Already you actually talk about some of this stuff too. So my podcast is called Silogon Sorcery. My podcast co host b goes through like the They're big on ingredients, so they'll go through like the metaphysical, the religious, the perfumery aspects of an ingredient, and then I do a deep dive on the perfume of the week, which is a perfume with that ingredient in it. We also do interviews to perfumers, not as many as we would like. We would love to do way more. So we kind of like intermix that in with our episodes where we do deep dives of popular perfumes. You'd be surprised how deep the rabbit hole goal goes for a lot of these companies that we all know and love and some fragrances that we all know and love. If you have any interesting rabbit holes about a specific company, I'm all ears you don't. You don't have to carter because it was too much. There was too much stuff. Uh. Les Wexner, who is the or like was the founder of The Limited, which then acquired Victoria's Secret so Bombshell, love Spell, all of our like nineties two thousand hits, especially if you were a teenager in a locker room, and Bath and body Works. We're both under like limited brands and Les Wexner's holdings. Les Wexner's power of attorney was given to Jeffrey Epstein. Didn't see that one coming, but I guess that makes sense considering everything else that goes on around there. And Jeffrey Epstein was using his connection to Les Wexner in order to have like say over women and like a sales tactic to bring young girls over because I can make you a Victoria's Secret angel. I'm the power of attorney for the guy who runs Victoria's Secret. Yeah, that's definitely Uh, that's definitely a rabbit hole. There's a lot of things on this show that I've wanted to get into, but for some reason, when you bring up certain topic, especially stuff like with him or anything else involving that whole type of thing, shows like this, especially on YouTube, get buried. Because it's interesting that the rich and powerful that control these corporations don't want you to talk about one of their own yep, So they have ways to kill things and bury it, and the algorithms conveniently don't pick it up. So I guess if anyone's listening to this on YouTube, you're probably one of the few that actually were able to find it. Is there anything else involving with the cult that you would like to talk about before we continue on? I think. Especially for your listeners as a person who studied cults in order to be a therapist who worked with cult victims, or if you have someone in your life who is in a cult, what I will say is the biggest thing is that it is small when it starts. Ultimately, my cult ended up with me doing drugs in the woods and thinking that I was talking to gods, which happened right. But originally it was just oh, I was meeting in a big class online once a week, and then it turned up. Then it went up to individual sessions once a week. Then it was oh, my god, you completed this level of training and now we're gonna have this retreat in the woods. And then it was oh, now we have paid gigs doing this. So everything kind of gets upped, and like the anti gets higher and higher, so. It's not. It's almost like frogs in a boiling pot of water. Water, Wow, my long Island came out there. But like frogs in a boiling pot, right, if you put them in a boiling pot, they're going to jump out immediately, but if you slowly raise the temperature, they'll killed themselves. And that's what being in occult is. They are never recruiting you, like, hey, you want to give up all your presentsions, your dog, your job, your relationship and join us. But that's not the recruiting tactic. It's always like do we want to just take this class and like learn how to be a better person. So for anyone listening, I would actually like to talk to someone that is listening that realizes they are in a cult. So I guess if anyone's out there that comes across this episode, if you think you're in a cult and are not sure, reach out to me and maybe I can get you to in contact with someone that can actually help. But there is a few people that I have talked to before that claim they used to be in a cult, and some of the stuff that they've mentioned, there's always similarities, and the things that you talked about are very similar to other things too. Like I'd spoken to someone when I first started the show, like over three years ago, they were in and I believe it was the Jehovah's Witnesses and just the way the men were in the control of everything. And I'm not trying to dog on anyone that's involved in that religion, but I always thought it was strange they go around and tell people that they go door to door and talk about the religion and how you can become a Jehovah's witness. But I believe it's only like one hundred and forty four thousand people supposedly go to heaven if that's the religion. Don't they think that there's already been that many? So I don't understand how someone can fall into something like that when there's a specific amount of people that are only going to be after you know what I mean, That aspect seems strange, but for some people they don't see it that way. And then you have people that are in other groups and we've had something around here and they claim it's odism, odism or whatever you want to call it, and they claim that's a cult too. So it's like, what is what is a definition for each person of what a cult can be is a little bit different. But if it boils down to it, if you're following someone's rules and they're trying to dictate the way you go about your own life, to me, it seems like you're kind of falling into what could be a cult. And that was the deciding factor for me, Like it took me a little bit to really embrace the fact that I was in a cult. Originally, I was just like, oh, I had this really weird experience, and you know, if I joined a coven, that got weird. But for me, if it wasn't so much of the messing with my life part once again, if it was just doing drugs in the woods like every two months, and like we got an airbnb and I just like took off on a random Friday and did that, I'd still be in It was you have to give up your dog, You need to quit your job. Why are you doing a second Master's don't you realize you're burnt out? You're burnt out? Right? Don't you feel burnt out? And I was like, no, I don't. I like being busy. Think I run a company now and I'm like, yeah, I'm doing shit all the time, and I'm totally fine. This is how I manage my ADHD. Like maybe I don't feel what you're telling me that I feel. I think that's where it starts getting culty. I've often wondered if people that get in the cults or if there's a specific with you. This is what I find it interesting with you being a therapist looking into all this stuff. When I think of people that fall in cults, is like, it's the people that are just seeking acceptance, is how I feel like. They want to be a part of something. They feel like they're not in control of things. They want someone to tell them it's going to be better the next day. And I feel like leaders pray upon those people, like not so much saying that they're weak, but like people that are just not in the right place mentally, physically, emotionally, and some person like sees that and then they they think that they're doing good by it, but they're really praying upon the week. So it's almost like I don't know if it's unintentional or some of them probably are very intentional, but it just seems to me like it's not That's what I usually think of when I think as someone who's been in a cult, but with you being a therapist and everything else. That actually took me for a little loop there for a second, because I was just like, wait a minute. If you're a therapist and you deal with people and everything else, it's like, how did you fall into a cult? And then you even talk about how you like you study that and everything. So it just goes to show that anyone out there can fall victim to someone else's influence without even understanding that you're falling in under their influence. Cults tend to. Really go after people who believe in the mission right, whatever that mission may be, because if you really believe in it, you're willing to work hard as hell for it. I know one of the girls while I was still in the group was a big influencer. She's very big on TikTok and she would constantly be sending people over to Lux as students. So she'd be like, Oh, I was talking to this person and I was telling them about you. They want to sign up to take your classes and be a student underneath you. And I think like that's kind. Of the recruiting is if you're going to do the work for the leader for free because you so believe in this mission. That's what they're looking for, because they need. Your work, be it your influence, be it your manual labor, your emotional investment, your time investment. I know for me it was money because my husband works in finance, So I. Am fairly certain that the reason that I was kept in was to provide a lot of monetary compensation in the group. So like they're looking for that. Like in Naxiom, Keith and Neery went after Claire Broffman, who was this billionaire heiress. There's so many instances of Okay. We need people who are going to work their asses off every day in pursuit of this mission. So it's usually not people who are directionless. It's usually people who are idealists, who really think that whatever the cult is preaching is the solution, and that they're willing to forego sleep for like for growing sleep is like a big thing in our cult, for going like time money, just so that you spend more and more time and are more invested in the cult. I think all cults, for some reason, there's all some sort of a beneficial gain to the person that's in charge of the cult, whether they realize that they're the cult leader or not, it always has some sort of benefit to them if you look at like Waco's obviously David Koresh thought he was a second coming of Christ, but he started to pray upon the people there, and it was all about the women. He had got to be this person's lover, and this guy had to give up his wife for them, like they always have to sacrifice something for the cult leader. You have to give up something or the leader to show that you're loyal to the cult leader. And I don't understand, like how people can become a cult leader and think like I don't know. I guess I don't have the rational thought process of someone that wants someone to be under my thumb at all point in time. Like I just it's probably a good thing, considering how big this podcast is, probably for the best. I just don't see how people can fall prey to that in the sense like if someone were to come up to me and tell me all this and that I would me personally I think I would not be able to fall victim to it. But at the same time, I guess again, I guess anybody can. But as far as me being like a person to be out there telling people, Hey, you're now loyal to the foil out here, you have to do what I say this and that, Like, that's just not my mentality. I'm not like that type of person. So how does someone you think become in that since you've done like studies on cults and stuff, how does someone become so far into their own belief of themselves that they became a cult leader. You think they actually believe that they're like the second coming of Christ, or they just put on this persona because people believe it. One of the things that happened in my cult, and I will just speak from my personal experience. So, after one of our quote unquote paid gigs, we were making offerings to Freya and at the bonfire, Lux took tattoo needles and gave them to each of us. And she'd said that the tattoo needles were from a tattoo she'd gotten with her ex girlfriend, and that the needles had been sitting on her prayer altar since the tattoo, and that she was willing to take these needles and put them in the bonfire as an offering to prayer Freya because we had replaced that level of love in her life. So on one hand, that's like hella love bombing right, right, Like that's like straight up textbook love bombing. Right. We are now the primary relationship in her life. But also if we wanted to kind of do this psychological deep dive of like how does someone become a cult leader? Well, I got out of this relationship and now I have a different relationship with people who will never leave me. Right again, I kind of what I was saying before. I feel like it's the people that are searching for something, and that cult leader, since themselves as what they're searching for, they have all the answers of what someone's looking for in. Life, and that can That's probably why I'm not in the cult anymore. Right, And I don't know me personally. When someone and I've said this about people, like you have a mothman thing behind you. When people talk about cryptids and they claim they're an expert, there is no experts in this type of field, Like have you studied a mothman? Have you studied a bigfoot? Have you? Like? No, Like when someone says they're an expert in UFOs and oh have you recovered one? Like you've flown around on them like I don't. I think there's people that are have a lot of information, but when someone has to call themselves an expert, they're usually full of shit and only believing in their own ego at that point, Like it's all just projecting themselves to be more than what they are. And I feel like that is kind of how a cult leader would resent themselves as their ego is projecting that they are all powerful, they know all the end, all be all. It's that godlike complex, So they have all the information that the people are looking for. One thing I will say, and once again this is based off of my own personal experience, not my study as like a trying to be a cult specialist, is that one of the big things that kept me in was every time the magic was validated. One of the experiences that I kind of talk about frequently is so when we were doing drugs in the woods, it was a whole ritual where I was inhaling henbane, which can totally fucking kill you, and when I was under because between the chants and the hen bane, and I had a voice that was coming out of me that was absolutely not mine and would answer questions that there was no way I could know. And I think a lot of what kept me in was anytime that the magic actually happened. And that is still something that like to this day, I have a lot of difficulty explaining, and I know that Lux wasn't behind that part. Like a really great example is I was working with this one god. I'd got a pulmonary embolism. I almost died. LUX told me that, like, you need to go to the er because this is not something you can solve on your own. And there was this one god who was like constantly around me at the time, so I was like, hey, you're associated with travelers, so you know, it would be's super cool if you could help me get my driver's license back because my driver's license had gotten suspended and then when I moved to Connecticut, I like tried to get it back, but it had gotten expired, and it was like this whole thing and I paid a bunch of money, but it was still suspended and I couldn't get my license back. And like a week later, we got a letter in the mail saying that they had changed the laws and my license was no longer suspended, and all I had to do was call this number and that my record would be clean and I could get my license in Connecticut. And I called the number and the number was like, not only did they clean it off, but they were like, hey, if you fill out this form, you'll get seven hundred and fifty dollars because you overpaid your tickets. Like, I cannot explain that, And that's something that my capricorn works in finance. Possibly autistic husband was like, you did some witchy shit because we've been working this for like two years and haven't made a dent. You asked a god to do it and it got done in a week, and we're getting seven hundred and fifty bucks. Now you're making me want to ask for some some help and see if I can get something. That's the thing where you're like, okay, wait, but that that that happened, like that one hundred percent happened. I have witnesses. We can back off with the fact that, like my license was suspended and then it got unsuspended, right, And how do I explain that. Part? How do I explain when I would be under and I'd answer questions that there was no way I would have known the answer, right, Yeah, that's. That's a strange one. I don't have any answers for that either, not that I have answers for anything, because I'm just a guy with a microphone and I don't know anything. But you're not a cult leader. I got it right. We've been going on for close to an hour, So I want to go back to your company. Where can everyone find information about it? So I own my own website, So I'm ww dot sifsniffs dot com. That's sif s ni f f s Siff is Thor's wife. So I still have some norse stuff going on. You can find me on Instagram, I'm on TikTok, I'm on Facebook, kind of all over. And then I also have a podcast called Scillog and Sorcery that I co host with another witchy perfumer named b and we make episodes every week. When you guys started the podcast, did you know them outside from doing perfume or did you meet online? Or how did not work? So the first class through Catland I took was with Dakota, who was Bee's partner. So Dakota kind of inadvertently and I don't think intentionally or knew what was going on with Lux, introduced me to Lux and then when I left the cults, I met with Dakota because they were like the only other like knowledgeable, had been part of the pagan community, person that I still trusted. And I remember Dakota just being like what the fuck Melissa, And the whole time be was like. Living with Dakota and like knew Dakota, like the two of them go together. So yeah, that it was Dakota that kind of really got me out and said, hey, the things that Lux was doing were not okay even by like Pagan which standards. And that's Bee's partner, and that's how I met be with three Dakota. Well, if you send me all of your information and an email, I will copy that. I will put it in the show notes for everyone listening, so they'll have links to your website and your podcast and where they can get ahold of you. We love it. Do you. Have any other events coming up? This won't come out for a while, but is there any events you have coming up for next year? Oh? So, I'm doing a bunch of fun Viking stuff. I'm doing the Viking Experience, I'm doing Norse forged Gathering, I'm doing a bunch of the Gothic Kingdom's Gothic markets. Check my website because my website has a whole events area and I'm hoping to get that updated. But yeah, I'm going all over the country, from salt Ly City to Florida to Maine. I go all over, so you can catch me around. I am around. I'm going to be at a few different events this year, mainly ENCRYPTID related events, So I guess if you have any of those on your schedule, I might end up being there at one of them. Not yet, but there's still time. There's still time. And to be honest, like some of them bring out a lot of people, and I don't see too many people there selling anything kind of like what you do, so it might actually be either a good thing or it could be a bad thing. You never know. Always always worth trying. Hey, at least I can make the room smell a little bit better. That's the end goal for May is at least came saw made it smell better. Right, Well, we can wrap this one up, but again, just send me whatever links you have and I will include those. Anyone out there listening, if you're interested, you can go to the show notes and find out more information about Melissa and her perfume company, and you can also check out her podcast. But we're going to wrap this one up, so thanks to Melissa and thanks for listening. If you would like to be a guest on Tenfoil Tels, remember to send an email to Tenfoil Tells Podcast to gmail dot com, or you can also go to tenfoiltales dot com and go to the contact section. Just make sure to reach out and get hold of me and we will get something schedule for a future episode. You can also find tenfoil Tales on Facebook and Instagram. Just look for tenfoil Tals podcast and reach out to me that way too. Remember to share the show around. Word of mouth is the best way to help the show grow, and just remember truth comes at cost. Are you willing to pay the price.