Choose Your Demographic

Think carefully about the kinds of people you would like in your school. Age range? Education Levels? Political Affiliations? Artistic Tastes? Religious Backgrounds (if any)?

Find Your Audience’s Grievances

Once you’ve focused on the type of people you want, try to discern the kinds of grievances they tend to have in common. These could be family abuse patterns, or religious origins, or a mistrusted/hated ethnic group. Anything will do, as long as it can be blamed for much or most of the suffering your audience has experienced.

Identify Your Audience’s Susceptibilities

Research your audience carefully. Take fastidious note of the kinds of cognitive biases they have, and any gaps in critical thinking, where group bonding or emotional passions lead them to turning blind eyes towards logical fallacies.

Choose a Captivating Aesthetic

Now you’ve defined the kinds of people you want, how to reach them, how to get them to drop their barriers of mistrust, how to get them to buy in. Now, you need a portfolio of motifs which they can proudly wear as their banner.

The trick is to be strange enough to be edgy, but not too eccentric so as to make members feel like weird nutters.

Bonus points for aligning with artistic (especially musical genres) associated with “outsider” or “social critic” postures.

One time-honoured aesthetic has been the musical metal/goth genre spectra, but take care because they’re looking a bit worn and tired these days. When Grandad is yelling “Fucking SLAYER!!” from his motorised wheelchair in the retirement village, with an inverse pentagram painted in blood on the back, it might be a good time to consider updating your aesthetic affiliations.

Curate Your Egregores

You need a portfolio of one or more egregored non-incarnate intelligent beings, whose existences cannot be proven or disproven through critical thinking and scientific method. If their untestability is seen as an issue, explain this away by repeatedly saying that an inability to connect with these beings is part of the plight of mainstream human existence, but with effort, guidance and various undefinable secret revalations, one just might gain the ability to get an occasional glimpse.

It takes a lot of effort to concoct entirely original egregores. It can be done, but for a fraction of the effort, you can dig through a few history texts and steal one or more egregores from the past which have had their eras of popularity.

If appropriating past egregores, expect best results if you choose ones that are right on the brink of being forgotten. Ones where the historical accounts are scanty, conflicting, hard to verify.

Write Compelling Back-Stories

Everyone loves stories. Come up with stories of chance discovery, where your protagonist has been hit with sudden, blinding revelations, completely unexpected. Revelations so intense that the recipient has tried to distance themselves, but finally had to start accepting.

Extra points for cherry-picking various accounts into an appealing narrative, which makes the reader feel like they’ve stumbled on nuggets of pure gold in the ditch along the side of the road, that everyone has driven past, but has been incapable of recognising.

Invent a “Secret Sacred” Realm

Circulate stories of advanced initiates accessing a realm beyond conventional space-time. Hold them in the highest esteem, which will start building feelings of inadequacy in newcomers from day one. Let those feelings of inferiority and inadequacy build, until newcomers start feeling prepared to do anything to get even the tiniest sign.

You need the newcomers to doubt more and more of themselves, and rescinding more and more of their critical thinking and due diligence.

Design a Hierarchy of Initiatory Levels

Everyone loves and hates hierarchies. Humans are not alone in this. Dog packs live or perish from their ability to sustain relatively stable hierarchies, where challenges are rare, usually resulting in death or injury to the challenger, or occasionally leading to the challenger ascending to a more senior role.

In an occult fraternity, you need people basing their sense of inner value on their assigned grades. You need them to feel that they are failing and falling short, unless they do everything in their power to climb as high as possible. You need them to feel that your school is the one true Revelation, that they are plentiful and common, that they have to sacrifice much in order to be even partially and temporarily worthy.

Craft Your Ceremonies

Ceremonies and their architecture will either make or break your fraternity. Your ceremonies must make the candidate feel ignorant, dependent, but with some hope of rising out of their inferior station.

Ensure your ceremonies, whether formally scripted, or loosely improvised based on the characteristics of the candidate, make strong reference to the egregores portfolio and the fraternity’s aesthetic setting.

Train Candidates to Active The Egregores Internally

This is where real skill comes in. Magic is real. Everyone has capability, whether or not some or all of it is under their conscious command. The art is to subtly induce the candidate to employ their own magic, without realising they’re doing it, to fabricate spaces within their subjective reality where the egregores, within the chosen aesthetic/cultural setting, start to take on a life of their own.

The candidate is then adapting and installing your “software” — your occult brand, with its stories, non-incarnate entities, cultural norms, social hierarchy rankings and so on, to open up their own rendition of the promised magical realm, beyond all space and time.

From then on, it’s merely a matter of making minor to moderate adjustments to the aspirant’s creation, to bring it into sync with the corresponding  subjective universe subscribed to by the fraternity as a whole.

By this point, the aspirant is starting to feel holy and special, like they’ve just barely started to qualify for membership among the elite privileged few.

Sustain the “Us Versus Them” Mindset

Keep up the messaging, reinforcing to members, aspirants and newcomers at all levels, that your fraternity is the only true real one, that they are unbelievably lucky to have come across it, and that people subscribing to different magical/religious/spiritual subjective universes are inferior, deluded, crazy or evil.

Reward Subscribers For Defending Your Brand

Assuming you have successfully created and are now sustaining your occult brand, expect jealousy and rivalry, both from outside, and from within. To manage these jealousies, bring in an inner circle of the “truly chosen few”, then delegate to them some authority to set up and manage their own systems of policing.

Task them with exposing heresies, challenges to authority, premature aspirations.

It only takes a few dramatic excommunications here and there, to send a chill down people’s spines, and keep them in line.

Keep them compliant, and reward them for sustaining their magical creative focus (but without realising they’re doing it) on sustaining the shared subjective universe of the fraternity’s sacred secret realms.