By a Supporter of the Ideals of Nxivm
The original purpose and vision of NXIVM lays in the history and meaning of its name.
Until the defectors and Frank Report destroyed it, there were various “NXIVM centers” which were buildings set up to administer Executive Success Programs, mostly, with some repurposing of those “centers” as places to administer other programs including JNESS, SoP, Ethicist, and other what Keith Raniere and Nancy Salzman would call “curriculum-based” programs.
Other programs were experiential in nature, such as Exo/eso, Ultima, and The Source, and Volleyball, requiring physical activity and often better suited to the outdoors or larger area like a gymnasium.
You’ve also reported on V-Week, a 10 day long celebration of Keith’s birthday. During these 10 days, children would be set up with caregivers and Rainbow and other programs for kids — and while this may sound cuckoo to the outsider, the kids loved V-Week.
Sara Bronfman did a wonderful job running it and she truly cared about the experience of the children and to give kids a chance to be kids and meet other kids with parents who wanted to change the world.
Nancy Salzman with Sara Bronfman at V-Week 2017.
Most people would look at that and call it crazy and move on, but the back story here is pretty fantastical, tracing back to the name of NXIVM.
Let’s start there.
Keith loved Latin names because you can cram a lot of meaning into one Latin name (take DOS for example, how long did people argue about the master-slave nature of the name?)
So, go back 20 years. Keith knew then that he wanted to create a distributed model of places for humans where they could grow and achieve, and he would need people to come together and self-organize into these centralized important places.
The word “Nexus” in English means this – the coming together of things or the most important place. Keith imagined multiple Nexuses, or Nexium, existing all over the world, each with “halls of tribute” with framed pictures of he and Nancy in a great hall, and human achievements of the local and world population.
Keith Raniere envisioned centers around the world where he and his Prefect, Nancy Salzman’s pictures would hang for people to remember them and give them tribute.
He imagined physical, mental, and emotional training centers in each Nexus that would be called Objectives. Dance, Science, Writing, Drums, Movie, Volleyball, Triathlon were among some of the first ideas.
He knew this was too much for people to wrap their head around, so he began with his Birthday, when everyone would gather together, and he slowly extended his birthday out from 1 day to 1 week to 10 days to almost two weeks.
He used his birthday as a prototype for a Nexus: he created these objectives, got people to run them, and he billed V-Week as an opportunity for people to experience how life could be if people lived with ethics.
This was to prepare them to challenge them to choose a place on earth and build a nexus of people, with land and buildings and curriculum and objectives, all interconnected with all other Nxivm, the center being in Albany NY but stretching out all over the world in a model of people choosing to live with ethics and love and non-violence.
Together, they would comprise NXIVM.
Proof of this initial design can be found here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20090204020209/http://nxivm.com/centers_1024.php
NXIVM teaches Executive Success Programs.
The “centers” were to become the “ground zero” of NXIVM, starting as buildings that held curriculum, but growing out to building larger centers (when the initial centers were outgrown) like the center that was almost built in Clifton Park, the model of a “mature Nexus crafted from steel, stone, and wood” but shut down due to neighbors discovering the cult news media.
At that point, seeing the first seed of his grand view of NXIVM shot down by media attention, Keith soon after formed The Knife of Aristotle, a movement focused on critical analysis of media, and at some point in there the cancer and sex stuff began amplifying in secret.
So, for those interested in what NXIVM means, how it relates to V-Week, objectives, and DOS, there you go.
