A Transgender Sith Lord, Peddling ‘Senseless Rigorism and Terror’

More than two centuries ago, a young wanderer named Johann Heinrich Schönherr found himself sitting along the banks of the Weser River in northern Germany, observing the colourful plants bobbing along its surface. These flowers had no roots, he noticed. They drew all their sustenance directly from sun and water. 

In that moment, Schönherr experienced an epiphany: what if the entire universe were one giant water flower, created from just two forces—one dark, female, and water-like, and the other bright, male, and fiery? In the folk version of Christianity that he would spend the rest of his life preaching, the biblical God was depicted as having emerged from these twinned primordial entities.

Schönherr even purported to know how the two proto-gods had become attached: after roaming the cosmos for untold aeons by himself, the fiery male entity came upon his aqueous female counterpart by chance—at which point, the former assumed the shape of a giant lightning phallus, and summarily thrust himself into the lady deity’s encircling cosmic billows, much to their mutual divine satisfaction. 

One might imagine that this R-rated animist space opera would be a hard sell within Schönherr’s native Prussia, whose conservative state-approved Christian dogma was rigorously monitored by a small army of bureaucrats. Yet as Cambridge historian Christopher Clark explains in a fascinating new book, A Scandal in Königsberg, Schönherr’s odd little sect attracted followers, including more than a few drawn from the cream of Prussian society. By one account, he even had an opportunity to present his ideas to Immanuel Kant. As Clark summarises it:

Granted an audience with the great man, Schönherr expounded with passion and candour his ‘system’ of the two primal entities. Kant listened patiently and replied that if all of this were true, then man ought in theory to be able to subsist by light and water alone, without any organic nourishment. Schönherr enthusiastically conceded the point, whereupon Kant advised him to try this method himself, with a view to adopting its success as an advertisement for the truth of his doctrine. Schönherr spent several days trying to live from light and water alone, and was soon persuaded by hunger to abandon the attempt.

Schönherr’s pronouncements became progressively more bizarre over the years, and his movement lapsed into a cult. He paraded about town with his followers in tow, claiming that the world would be redeemed from sin only once humanity acknowledged the truth of his doctrines.

He died in 1826, shortly after instructing his groupies to build a paddle-boat whose unique (and presumably divinely inspired) design had come to him in a dream. It sank immediately.

Clark focuses closely on the social panic that came to surround Schönherr’s former acolytes—especially a rising clergyman named Johann Wilhelm Ebel, who was accused of promoting ritualised group sex (allegedly as a gesture of homage to the water and fire elementals whose astro-coitus created our universe). These accusations were false. But thanks to the hysterics surrounding the case (richly documented in the official German sources that Clark reviewed), Ebel’s reputation was ruined anyway. In Clark’s view, the melodrama constituted an early nineteenth-century German take on what we would now call cancel culture.

Why were so many upstanding Prussians drawn to Schönherr’s strange theories? Clark offers the example of Ida von der Groeben, a high-born young Königsberger who’d been tormented with religious anxieties since childhood. She suffered, as Clark describes it, “the apprehension that salvation would be denied her because she had failed to find a way of loving God above all people and things.”

This was the terror of God’s wrath that Reformation-era monks had once called the “bath of hell.” The arid state-approved strain of German Protestantism that Ida heard preached on Sundays had done nothing to alleviate her distress. It was only thanks to Ebel’s idiosyncratic ideas and ebullient preaching style, Ida later reported, that she’d “gained a glimpse into the paternal heart of God and his love for [her]…God himself soon became [her] true love.”

Central Europe was then full of such melancholy specimens. Clark quotes from a 1799 report claiming that about two-thirds of German asylum patients were believed to “have become mad by way of excessive religiosity or through ruminating on religious questions…They accused themselves of great sins and were in deep doubt as to whether they were in a state of grace.”

According to Gustav Blumröder, a prominent early nineteenth-century Bavarian psychiatrist, religiously inspired malaise was especially common among those who’d become ensnared by the “senseless rigorism and terror” enforced by local conventicles—tinpot theocracies lorded over by “deliberate stupefiers” and “theological half-men.”

The idea that our cosmic milieu is controlled by mysterious light and dark (as well as male and female) forces remains common in many spiritual movements. So, too, is the notion that humanity is divided between those who are good and those who are evil, and that humanity is hurtling towards a moment of rapture, whereupon the former will find honour and grace, while the latter will be annihilated.

It’s an apocalyptic vision that often finds its way into cultish political and ideological movements, which similarly present history as an existential conflict between good and evil forces, fated to end in cataclysm. This would include the “Zizians,” a murderous cult that emerged from Northern California meet-ups devoted to intellectual self-improvement and the utilitarian social project known as “effective altruism.”

The Zizians have been on the public radar in the United States since 2025, when The New York Times and Wired each published long-form investigations. But Andy Ngo’s The Zizians: Inside a Trans Death Cult represents the first book-length treatment of the subject.

Ngo, an American journalist who’s also published a best-selling book about Antifa (and who once worked at Quillette in the late 2010s), situates the roots of the Zizians within the philosophical movement known as “rationalism,” which he describes as a sort of nerdball megachurch for intellectually ambitious tech workers in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The general mission of the Berkeley-based Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR), which figured prominently in Zizian recruitment efforts (and equally prominently in their later conspiracy theories), is to correct imperfections in human intelligence that can undermine research and policy-making. But beginning about a decade ago, the group’s focus increasingly shifted to something more specific: the threat to humanity posed by artificial intelligence.

Central to this transformation was a celebrated über-rationalist named Eliezer Yudkowsky, who had years earlier started up an affiliated outfit now called the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI). Yudkowsky is absolutely not a Zizian. (Just the opposite: after Yudkowsky and other CFAR/MIRI personnel cut ties with Zizian members, the cult repeatedly attempted to smear him as a sex criminal.) But admirers of Yudkowsky (who is often referred to as “Yud” in rationalist circles) sometimes exhibit their own cultish tendencies. His essays (known portentously as The Sequences) are treated as something close to sacred scripture, and get dissected with Talmudic intensity in the comment threads of LessWrong and other rationalist blogs. Such is the awe Yud inspires that even his Harry Potter fan fiction is treated as an important contribution to the rationalist canon.

Years before the idea of AI “doomerism” became common currency in the media, Yudkowsky’s followers became fixated on the threat posed by a “Singleton”—a massively powerful AI system that they fear will take over the planet and treat humans as its slaves (or worse).

In the most horrifying version of this scenario, known as Roko’s Basilisk, the AI overlord will find and torture any human being who hasn’t actively expedited its creation. Since this omniscient cyber-demon would have access to every scrap of electronic flotsam that any of us ever produced (and possibly even possess mind-reading skills), it will be impossible for any of us to scrub our record clean of anti-basiliskoid thoughtcrimes.

One might assume that the Zizians, or any self-identified “rationalist,” would be quick to dismiss this ghoulish reverie on the basis that it clearly represents a secularised adaptation of Luther’s “bath of hell,” with a computerised “Singleton” stepping in for God as the all-knowing avenger of sin. But apparently, that’s not the case: Roko’s Basilisk became the centrepiece of the Zizians’ doomsday cult mythology.