Jonathan Hirsch
speaker
1,168 appearances
9 recordings
3 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 5 Jun
Jonathan Hirsch’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Now, I've covered cults, new religious movements, for a long time now. I was actually raised in one. Turns out, long story for another time. But I can tell you with confidence that I have familiarity with the New Age movement and the mystical ideas that informed Terry's philosophy.
This was not an organized spiritual worldview, more like a salad of different so-called mystical ideas tossed together. Janine had quickly become a part of Terry's innermost circle. She actually helped name their budding group, Conscious Development of Body, Mind, and Soul, and wrote their handbook with Sandra and another follower on Sandra's typewriter.
This is someone reading a passage from the original CDBMS handbook, which I found buried in an archive of fringe religious groups at a California university.
Conscious development was about your personal journey towards spiritual maturity. Terri was there to help you along, like a spiritual coach almost. She was in your corner. She was cheering on her faithful, encouraging them to try new things, to become a more advanced spiritual being. Sometimes that meant letting go of people who weren't serving your growth.
Of course, that's not how Janine saw it at the time. She was committed. She was raising her son, recently married. She had her own flock of students and community of like-minded friends in Dallas. It was all she ever wanted. Until Terry came for her husband, Rick.
Rick did not like that Terry was encouraging him to cheat on his wife.
The darkness that Janine's talking about, that all began when Terry started talking about the Black Lords.
This Black Lords shit was getting weird. The teachers began to perform detailed rituals designed to protect themselves from the Black Lords. They accumulated various tools, wands, swords, and these weapons alongside their spiritual energy would be used to battle the Black Lords.
So the groups of followers would be engaged in a choreographed battle, fighting the Black Lords with bronze talismans.
Wait, what? Bloodletting? I'd read and heard a lot of out there stuff about Terry's beliefs at this point, but this was a dark turn. Terry believed that the Black Lords were poisoning the blood of her students, and the only way to cleanse them, and there's no easy way to say this, was to extract their blood.
It was bizarre. Terry had seemingly crossed a line, and Janine knew it. But also, nothing bad enough had happened to her to leave. She was a frog in boiling water.
It's probably hard for someone who hasn't been through an experience like this to appreciate how difficult it would have been to leave. Janine wasn't being physically harmed, and she trusted the path Terry had set everyone on. She was smart and trusting, but that, I know for a fact, doesn't stop people from joining cults.
It actually makes it easier for you to rationalize weird and dangerous shit because you can find a reason it might be good for you in the long run. The thoughts about leaving Terry were growing in Janine's mind, blooming out of a black seed, a seed poisoned by a leader who now seemed completely divorced from reality so as to be alarming.
Janine couldn't confirm for me when she officially left CDBMS, but it was in the mid to late 70s, late 76, early 77. And Terry did not take it well.
I've heard other accounts of Terry doing this, calling out specific members or enemies and announcing that they were a black lord, a danger to the group. But now Janine heard her son was a target, a little kid.
To eliminate all doubt about what Janine just described, she believed Terry had marshaled dark energy from her followers, causing Janine to run over her son's arm.
Janine left Terry behind, moved on, and tried not to follow up on it all, she told me. The rest of the members of CDBMS, they went right on into an alternative reality that didn't exist. Except for one person. Terry's second husband, Glenn Cooley. Next time on Scary Terry.
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Drowning, freak accidents, double suicides, murder. A dozen people from Dallas, Texas died mysteriously. All of them had one person in common, a spiritual leader by the name of Terry Hoffman.
Showing 1141–1160 of 1,168 · page 58 of 59
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