Anti-Man BDSM Cult That Made Video Games & Invented Cosplay (Nothing Changes)

A deep dive into the strange history of a 1970s fantasy religion that broke containment into real-world communes, immersive boarding school experiences, and early computer game development. The episode traces its evolution from Oxford-area writings and goddess-focused observances through anti-modern settlements in Ireland, the creation of text adventures on Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum hardware, and later publishing efforts.

Listeners explore how the group attempted financial self-sustainability, the role of role-play and discipline practices in its later phases, connections to far-right materials, and why the movement ultimately remained a niche online remnant rather than a lasting community. The discussion highlights themes of invented religions, alternate reality games before the term existed, and the challenges of building sustainable new belief systems.

Show Notes

Hat tip to those who sent us to the YouTube video (and check it out if you haven’t seen it!): The Neo-Victorian Neo-N*zi Lesbian BDSM Cult That Made Video Games by Tor’s Cabinet of Curiosities

Fantasy World Breaking Containment

This weird movement emerged from what was probably a fantasy world:

* Around 1973–74, a small Oxford-based circle produced the texts that became the Madrian/Filianic sacred writings: notably the Sacred Mythos, The Crystal Tablet, and The Teachings of the Daughter.

* Members regarded these writings as inspired—sometimes described in terms of divine inspiration or trance—rather than merely as a conventional authored religious manifesto.

* A more public movement then emerged under the banner Lux Madriana, distributing scripture and catechism, publishing the newsletter The Coming Age, holding religious observances, and recruiting through the era’s feminist, occult, and alternative-spirituality networks.

A later Filianist source describes the founders not as a formal college club but as a small group of people in Oxford and the Home Counties who created a complete religious framework: theology, scriptures, ritual calendar, terminology, and community practices.

Madrianism was unusual among 1970s British Goddess movements because it was not simply Wicca with a stronger female focus. It presented itself as a structured, devotional religion—more analogous in style to a sacral tradition with scripture, prayer, catechism, feast days, rosaries, priestly roles, and moral teachings.

Its core claims included:

* The ultimate divine reality is feminine: Déa, the Mother.

* Divine life is understood in a threefold form, later commonly expressed as Creator, Sustainer/Daughter, and a transcendent or “Beyond” aspect.

* The Daughter functions in a savior-like role, giving the tradition a devotional shape that some observers find reminiscent of Marian and Christian forms.

* The faith had a sacred calendar and a named set of spiritual virtues/emanations, the Janyati.

* Prayer, religious study, handmade devotional items, domestic community, and a refusal of aspects of modern consumer culture were emphasized.lambentpath.

Here’s where the breaking of containment emerges: The Oxford-origin Madrian milieu eventually split into several strands:

* One stream became associated with Aristasia, a female-centered constructed world/community.

* Another developed communal, anti-modern, and increasingly role-based forms in Yorkshire before relocating to Burtonport, Donegal, in 1982 as the Rhennish Community / Silver Sisterhood.

The Emergence of a Victorian Curiosity

This movement physically manifested with a primal scream, literally.

In 1974, the Atlantis Primal Therapy Commune descended upon the Irish town of Burtenport, buying a large house they subsequently painted with rainbow colors, murals, slogans, and zodiac imagery.

Commune members quickly became known by townspeople as “the screamers” because members used confrontational “primal scream” sessions—shouting, crying, and sometimes aggressively challenging one another—as a supposed form of emotional release. They weren’t fans of the middle-of-the-night primal scream sessions.

In 1989, they left Burtonport proper for Inishfree/Inisfree, a remote Donegal island, where it continued communal and subsistence living, and this opened up the logistical portal through which the Silver Sisterhood was able to physically manifest.

St. Bride’s School

Though the Silver Sisterhood first moved to Burtonport hoping to form an anti-modern communal settlement calling the house An Droichead Beo, Irish for “The Bridge of Life.”

Their pre-boarding-school era is captured in RTE archives.

They lived without electricity and just seemed like self-contained bog hags.

* Daily life included Rhennish-language music and storytelling, prayer-oriented work, and making their own instruments and clogs.

* They planned to sell handmade clogs and embroidered textiles, grow crops, work the surrounding land, and gradually bring more members from Yorkshire.

That failed and they pivoted to branding the house as St. Bride’s School, which sold an immersive, Victorian-style boarding-school holiday for adult women.

The boarding school era was much more fun, though the house remained without electricity or modern appliances (with one notable exception), though they did like to listen to songs on their hand-cranked gramophone.

Visitors—adult women, generally in their 20s and 30s—paid for week-long “terms” in which they lived 24 hours a day as pupils in an imagined 1920s–30s English girls’ boarding school. They wore period clothes, followed school routines, attended lessons, went on outdoor rambles, used old-style money in the tea room, and took part in mystery games based on noticing clues in the surrounding landscape.

* It’s in these mystery game that the Silver Sisterhood may have gotten into video games

* On rambles, participants noticed odd objects or features, imagined them as clues, and worked out supposed hidden connections—the activity that inspired the group’s text adventure The Secret of St Bride’s.

The Video Games

The group’s move into video games seems to have started with one resident, Priscilla Langridge, who brought a Commodore 64 to St Bride’s and began turning the community’s real-life mystery games and heavily imagined boarding-school world into text adventures.

* The venture then became both a small business and highly effective publicity for St Bride’s, despite the school’s public rejection of modern technology

They called their computer an ordinator. One of the sisterhood’s leaders, Miss Martindale, is quoted as saying that games required concentration and commitment, whereas television was passive.

Langridge used The Quill, an adventure-game creation system.

* She reportedly began on a Commodore 64 and later moved to the ZX Spectrum.

* The first game, The Secret of St Bride’s (1985), made the school itself the premise: a character arrives at a 1985 Irish holiday center built around old-fashioned boarding-school life, then begins to suspect it is actually 1927.

St. Bride’s School ultimately released several ZX Spe