[ANNOUNCEMENT] Rebranding, the way forward, & dispelling confusion

As you may have noticed, we’ve gone through some minor changes recently.

First and foremost being that, from now on, this platform will be known officially as The Occult Mirror, or TOM.

A place to reflect on yourself and discover your own power, as you stand on your own feet and realize that this world is, and always has been, your playground.


Secondly, we are aware that rumours and questions have been circulating, and that things are being said in other corners of the internet about the chain of events that necessitated this change.

In this post, we hope to address any and all questions or concerns that you, as a valued member of our community, might have.

If you would like further clarification, please send a group DM to the @moderators group, or to any of the forum staff: @ReyCuervo, @norse900, @Nephenthe, @Veil.


Why did this happen?

This series of events began when one of the forum founders allowed a rule change regarding free divination.

The decision was backed by two other forum founders. One founder was offline at the time. The final count regarding this rule change was 3 for, 1 against, and 1 absent.

After the dissenting founder (the founder who voted “no”) expressed their disapproval at the rule change, an internal discussion followed, which devolved into a one-sided argument of insults and name-calling directed by the dissenting founder against another founder.

Shortly after this, a new user named TheFuckinOwner joined the forum, and was then granted Moderation and Administration/Staff rights by the dissenting founder. No attempt was made to discuss this addition in staff with other founders. User TheFuckinOwner then made a thread titled “Greetings from The Fuckin Owner” in the Staff-only area. In this thread, user TheFuckinOwner staked a claim to The Occult Nation forum; stated he will not “tolerate” certain behaviour from staff; and demanded written apologies, with a precise US date & timezone given as the deadline for said written apologies.

It was taken as implied that TheFuckinOwner was asserting control over the TON business and by extension the forum, and that other staff must comply with the demand to provide written apologies.

The four remaining staff members decided to go with democracy over demands, and here we are.


What happened after that?

There was no vote. X and/or TheFuckinOwner refunded money sent by co-founders to support The Occult Nation LLC to the co-founders who paid money, but this was not requested by any of the co-founders.

All billing information was immediately changed from the The Occult Nation LLC, a registered US-based business, to another founding member’s personal billing information. All webhooks, APIs, links, etc., to any monetary sources registered to or associated with The Occult Nation LLC were removed from the back-end of the forum. This was done by the remaining 4 co-founders.

As per the dissenting founder’s stated wish to refund other founders and “go it alone”, the dissenting founder and user TheFuckinOwner were demoted and silenced, and the remaining founders proceeded with immediate plans and actions to sever ties with The Occult Nation LLC.


Who owns The Occult Nation LLC business?

The Occult Nation LLC is a US-based business legally owned by a gentleman personally known to only one of the original founding members (the dissenting founder) of The Occult Nation LLC.

The remaining four founders are and were not associated with this person in any way, and had neither met nor spoken to this individual in person or electronically until this individual joined The Occult Nation LLC forum under the username TheFuckinOwner.


Who owns this forum, The Occult Mirror (TOM)?

The four remaining founding members (Veil, norse900, ReyCuervo, Nephenthe) collectively claim the The Occult Mirror’s open-source software license, server, and host domains and pay for them out of our own pockets.

The Occult Mirror is not legally associated with the business The Occult Nation LLC in any way.

The previous forum, including all its users, contents, and data, were paid for solely by @Nephenthe, and then migrated to this new domain (www.theoccultmirror.net), which again, is solely paid for and hosted by our founders.


I’m still confused. Who owns what?

Neither The Occult Nation LLC forum nor its domain were ever paid for by the The Occult Nation LLC business. It was paid out of the personal bank account of Nephenthe.

By refunding, without request, any moneys generated under The Occult Nation LLC to the respective founder who paid it, after stating a desire to sever ties and go her own way without a forum, we the co-founders of The Occult Mirror could interpret this only as a deliberate severing of ties by the dissenting founder and The Occult Nation LLC owner, known by the pseudonym TheFuckinOwner, from the four other founders.

Tl;dr – the Occult Nation LLC is owned by the user known as TheFuckinOwner and is in no way associated with The Occult Mirror.


What else will change?

We are rebranding shortly and will continue to tidy the forum to reflect this change. We have a new name and a new domain. Otherwise, nothing will change.

Again, The Occult Nation LLC is the sole legal property of the person known by the the username TheFuckinOwner, and we make no claim to any stake in this business, which is a completely separate entity to this forum, The Occult Mirror.


I’ve heard [claim]/[rumour], is it true?

While we can’t keep track of every rumour, claim, and bit of hearsay, we can address the ones we know about. Below, we may refer to the dissenting founder as “X”.


Did you lock X out of the The Occult Nation LLC website?

No. We legitimately cannot & could not do that for the following reasons:

  1. X changed the password(s) for the shared email address and other accounts (including the website) used to administer The Occult Nation LLC forum, website back-end, Etsy store, and Instagram account. This was advised to all other founders in writing by X, which the remaining founders take as further evidence of X’s desire to sever ties between The Occult Nation LLC and the other founding individuals.

  1. The website back-end login is/was protected with 2FA security, linked to the above email. No other co-founder has access to this email since its password was changed by X.

  2. The email account itself, which was created by X, was also protected with 2FA security, which is linked to the personal phone of X, which no other founder has access to.

The email address appears to have now been closed by X.

As of now, The Occult Nation LLC website appears to have been taken offline by the owner of The Occult Nation LLC.


Please click here for more Q&A.

Did you lock X out of The Occult Nation LLC’s official Instagram account?

No. The password was changed by the dissenting founder and no other co-founders have access to the Instagram account or any of the content on it, including any personal, original content or intellectual property.

The Instagram account may have been deleted at this time.


Did you get together to attack another community?

We created a new forum with the sole intent of a clean slate, a place where people of all walks of life can come together to learn and share their experiences and knowledge. We can confirm that while we have placed protections around the forum, the purpose of this forum is not to begin a war or stage an attack against any collective or individual.


We have been told you outright lied about everything!

This thread and the “Staff Changes” thread are our official statement. We stand by this information and have written and supporting documentation to this effect.

Please ask any questions if you have concerns or would like clarification on any point.


Is this a legal issue? Will this end up in court?

We have severed ties with the The Occult Nation LLC business.

At no point was any of the revenue generated by The Occult Nation LLC business used to create or support The Occult Mirror (this forum).

The dissenting founder has been provided a .zip file containing a copy of all of their own content/user activity, and any threads containing their intellectual property have been closed, unlisted, and moved to a non-public area of the forum. These threads and any other content published will be immediately deleted upon request, and The Occult Mirror have reached out to advise this. If no response is received within 5 business days, the account will be anonymised and/or any public posts deleted to protect the IP of the user in question.

Edit 25 Sept 2022: As we have received no formal written request for account or thread deletion, all X’s original IP threads will be retained in non-public areas of the forum, i.e, hidden from public view. X is welcome and invited to contact our mod/staff team through various available channels (email, phone, Discord, Slack, other forums, etc.) to request deletion of specific posts/threads, however we will not be deleting them unless specifically requested by X.

To reiterate an earlier point, The Occult Nation LLC’s forum, and the domain it and the website were hosted on, was purchased using the personal funds of another co-founder, not by The Occult Nation LLC. While the payment information for The Occult Nation LLC forum was briefly changed to another account linked to The Occult Nation LLC, it was reverted back to another co-founding member’s personal billing account before the next payment cycle, so to the best of our knowledge, no money was paid out of The Occult Nation LLC’s funds toward the domain, including the website and forum.


Can this lack of leadership compromise the forum’s future?

No. We have an established order to make things work, but it is so far away from other forms of organization that we wouldn’t even call it an hierarchy. It is a democracy. There is always someone calling the shots in any given area, but is not always the same person. We play to our strengths and let the right person do the job.


Is the forum glitching because X’s magick isn’t here?

No. We changed some visual elements to remove any ties to the business The Occult Nation LLC, which is why the forum looks different. Please stand by while we rebrand. We knew this was going to happen and it has nothing to do with magick.


Being a young community, how could this happen?

We don’t have an answer for what triggered the actions of an individual acting on their own behalf, and will not speculate as to the opinion, stance, thoughts, feelings, or otherwise of any individual.


Can you go on without TheFuckinOwner backing the forum?

This individual was used to register The Occult Nation LLC as a US-based business, as decided by the dissenting co-founder of The Occult Nation LLC, to allow income streams which were intended to be funnelled back into the business.

As we are no longer associated with The Occult Nation LLC, it is not relevant to this forum, The Occult Mirror, which is an entirely separate endeavour and has no legal ties to The Occult Nation LLC.


Is it not a dick move to keep the forum when X made it happen?

The idea of a new community had been floating around for about a year, brought up by at least eight different people, to various co-founders. One day things aligned so it could happen, but @Nephenthe is the only one with the technical expertise to make it so; @Veil branded and created graphics by hand; and @ReyCuervo wrote a huge amount of initial content so there could be something ready to welcome members to our new community. We did this for our beloved @norse900, who was the catalyst.

X contributed her own strengths as well, and despite everything, we wish her absolutely no ill will and thank her for her contributions to the previous endeavour that spawned this new one, The Occult Mirror.

Again, X contributed and was a vital part of our previous endeavour. However, we stand by our words in saying it was a collective effort of five individuals, not the work of one person alone.


Had this been building up for some time?

We don’t know and cannot/will not speculate on the thoughts, opinions, stance, etc., of another individual.


What about the money X spent?

Our understanding is that any money spent by X, such as printing and/or shipping costs, were incurred as a business expense on behalf of The Occult Nation LLC, which is owned by X via proxy of the gentleman known to us as TheFuckinOwner.

Refunds for money sent to the business by co-founders were provided to co-founders, which were not asked for and done at the decision of X and/or TheFuckinOwner, which, again, was taken as indicative intent to sever ties with other co-founders, as specified in the screenshot at the beginning of this post.


Tell me the truth, did you see this coming?

No. When you have a group working, minor disagreements in opinions are to be expected, but nobody thought this could happen in a few hours, much less so soon after launch.


Are you going to apologize to anyone?

@ReyCuervo did personally apologise to X prior to TheFuckinOwner joining the forum. While the apology was acknowledged (via the forum’s built-in “like” button) there was no indication if the apology was accepted or not, and events continued to escalate as outlined in this post.

While we regret that this is the conclusion of events, we stand by our decisions, as exaggerated as they may have been made to seem upon retelling in other corners of the internet.

Our only apology extends to you – our community – for this minor disruption.


There is a group PM going on in another platform, I saw the username of two or three of you there.

Yes, you saw it. And yes, we were invited.

In this thread we hope to address everything that was said there, and we have personally spoken with the most concerned person in that group.

One of our founders attempted to join the conversation and was removed after a few messages, and then responded to when they no longer had access to view the response given. Regardless, we have no wish to be involved in online arguments.

Our only concern is the stability and sanctity of our community – you guys.


In that PM, there is a screenshot of an official note from TheFuckinOwner, what about that?

We don’t know to whom that note is addressed, we only saw it in that PM and nowhere else. It wasn’t sent to any of the staff here. It may have been emailed in, however, we do not have access to the email account, as explained above, as the email was created by X, and the password later changed so that no other founder had access to it.

In TheFuckinOwner’s self-stated official note, he said that one person apologized. We can confirm that this is accurate in word if not in spirit (if you’ll forgive the interjection of personal opinion to this post). The dissenting founder responded “I apologise for not keeping my thoughts to myself”. This occurred in the same internal thread in which TheFuckinOwner originally made his demand for apologies.


Is this going to lead to a magickal war?

No. This isn’t Hogwarts and we are not Harry Potter, and have no wish to stage-act Dumbledore’s Army vs. The Death Eaters. We have no ill will toward any collective or individual, and simply wish to be left in peace to practice magic and share knowledge that benefits us all.


As a final note, we’re very sorry it came to this. The community deserves better. You deserve better.

X was our friend. For some of us, a friend of many years. And there was no way we could have predicted this outcome, especially so early in the days of the forum.

It is a shame that it had to end this way. We wish no ill will to anyone, and hope to part on amicable terms, with no animosity now or in future.

Please join us now in looking to the future, not the past. We wholeheartedly believe great things are yet to come. For all of us. So stay tuned.

All the love.

@Norse900, @Nephenthe, @Veil, @ReyCuervo

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