By Yasmine Alregabi
It started as a bizarre joke on TikTok.
On July 10, a young woman named Gigi Jarvis, known as “notgigijarvis” on TikTok, announced she was starting a cult called The Children of the Waning Star. To many people, apparently, it sounded fun and ironic, just a joke on the idea of cults.
The next day, Jarvis greeted her followers on TikTok with, “Hi, cult leader here…” Over the following week, her posts would attract more than 30 million views.
But what started as a gag quickly spiraled into something alarming. In the name of the cult, followers began to physically self-harm and share images of themselves holding dead animal “sacrifices.” The episode would come to serve as a warning: when influencers use provocative language for engagement, they risk consequences far beyond what they may have intended.
“Trolling only works if you understand that it is actually trolling,” said Adam Kunz, an assistant professor of political science and criminal justice at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire who researches cults and coercive influence online. “If a child is watching this, they might be taking it as sincerity and genuineness. Kids do not have that part of their brain fully developed that says, ‘I should [think] critical about this.’”
The Children of the Waning Star began as a kind of photo-sharing club.
“The first thing I want to start doing is victim of the week, where whoever drops the funniest photo in my comment section, I am going to steal your profile picture and become you for a week,” Jarvis said on TikTok, in a nod to the popular trend in which users create so-called “profile picture cults,” a term coined in 2020.
Then Jarvis upped the ante, suggesting that cult “members” post photos of their pets to serve as metaphorical “sacrifices.” She also asked followers to share the cult’s star symbol and fingerprint-emojis, and to “think of it as me literally coming to you and branding it onto your skin.”
Then she introduced the concept of “the entity.”
“Be on the lookout for the next meeting because we will be speaking about the entity,” Jarvis said on July 14. “Many members have mentioned an entity has come to visit them.”
Soon, videos emerged on TikTok of young people “praying” to Jarvis as well as inflicting self-harm such as pouring wax onto their skin as an “offering.” Things spread to Discord, with people (many who appeared to be minors) showing images of themselves holding dead animals that were “sacrifices,” or even pricking their fingers so the blood would call forth “the entity.”
These behaviors reflect how young audiences are susceptible to online influence. A 2019 study by the National Library of Medicine found a correlation between Problematic Internet Use and Psychotic-Like Experiences among adolescents, concluding that exposure to distressing online content can increase delusional or hallucinatory thinking.
When fan accounts claimed to have seen “the entity,” Jarvis amplified their posts. In the comments sections of related videos, children as young as 12 discussed their attempts to “see” the entity.
After July 14, as criticism started to mount online of Jarvis’s posts, she backtracked. She said she began the series because she “wanted to post something crazy” and had used the word “cult” as a “clickbait term.” The 25-year-old sociology graduate from Kennesaw State University also claimed to not understand that “cult” had negative connotations. She added that she would no longer use the term.
Jarvis rebranded her series as Starting a Community. Two days later, on July 16, under increasing criticism, Jarvis said she had been “throwing up and crying the whole day,” after hearing about followers self-inflicting harm and abusing animals. But she also dismissed most of those allegations as unfounded rumors.
“What evidence do you have of me starting something horrible and evil?” Jarvis asked, before announcing she was taking a break from TikTok.
Kunz, the expert on cults, highlighted many red flags.
“When people start to hurt themselves, that’s an indication to me that we’re shifting into unhealthy territory,” said Kunz, who is an academic liaison to the Lalich Center on Cults and Coercion, which provides resources and support to survivors of cults and coercive relationships. “I work with cult survivors a lot, and with ideological harm — whether it’s psychological or physical — the minute that starts happening, that’s an indicator we are on the wrong track.”
After two months of online silence, Jarvis announced in a new video that the FBI had contacted her.
“Yesterday two FBI agents came over to my house, and I spoke with them about ‘The Children of the Waning Star,’” she said on Sept. 10. “Currently, the FBI has found no evidence that these allegations [of self-harm and animal abuse] are true. If you have any evidence of this happening, I really want to urge you to go onto the FBI website and submit a report.”
Kunz suggested another path forward to combat this type of online toxicity.
“I think it’s gonna take a coalition of millennials, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha,” Kunz told APN. “It’s parents being informed, it’s consumers being aware of it, knowing what counts as real and what doesn’t.”
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