Every popular internet platform has its share of eccentrics and individualists. There’s plenty of unsavory strangeness to be found on Twitter and YouTube, for instance, for those who seek it out. But writer Angel Archer got way more weirdness than she bargained for when she investigated the phenomenon known as Tumple, “a new religious movement” whose members spend way too much time in oddball Facebook groups, for her article “Inside The Magic Sex Cult Recruiting From Facebook Meme Pages.” But this title, however enticing, is misleading. Based on the evidence presented in this article, there is very little about Tumple that is either sexy or magical. The “cult” part, at least is accurate. Tumple self-applies that label without apparent shame on its own FAQ page. Tumple emerges from Archer’s article as a group that functions both as a critique of traditional cults, duly updated for the social media age, and a transparent scam whose real purpose is to extract hefty subscription fees from its members. As to the latter, Tumple punningly describes itself as “a for prophet business.”
The article raises more questions than it answers, with the tenets of Tumple remaining frustratingly opaque throughout. But some key aspects of the cult do come into focus. The group has two identified founders: 49-year-old Wiz-El and 39-year-old Koa Malone. For $2,000 a month, subscribers can be privy to “lessons in their mystic sex practices.” Tumple also markets a spiritual program called “FlyWheelun’” for a semiannual fee of $1,000, a relative bargain. The group’s actual beliefs and aims are more difficult to ascertain, largely because its members speak in circuitously worded generalities and prefer to communicate via “Unglish,” essentially a corrupted form of the English language. In its favor, however, Tumple does dispense with the more tedious aspects of previous religions and cults, preferring hashtags to prayers, rituals, and chants. In the end, Archer declares that “Tumple’s beliefs are completely sincere—yet it has enough of a sense of humor to make its ulterior motives totally transparent.”