From astrology to plastic surgery

I watched the new HBO documentary Bring Me The Beauties, about Eternal Values, a 1980s astrology cult based in Manhattan, where the leader, Frederick von Mierers, prioritized having beautiful followers—many of them were highly successful fashion models. And von Mierers himself was extremely into physical perfection—getting several facelifts, adhering to a strict diet, etc. (Of course, this kind of backfired, as he ended up resembling Max Headroom).

Along with physical perfection, Eternal Values emphasized metaphysical knowledge—theosophy, Hindu astrology, channeling past lives, astral projection, alien spirits “walking in” to take over human forms, etc.; they sold gems which were claimed to help their wearers transcend to higher levels of being; all of it highly questionable, but all of it still based on rich content, from the history of theosophical thought and metaphysics and on and on.

Watching the documentary and learning about the Eternal Values cult, I couldn’t help thinking the trend of “looksmaxxing” and its foremost online exponent, “Clavicular.” After like a dozen cosmetic surgeries, and ingesting tons of chemicals to optimize his biology, he’s become famous for livestreaming his journey as he tries to “looksmax”—pursuing physical perfection, in much the same way Frederick von Mierers and his followers did, 40 years ago.

One was an esoteric Manhattan cult steeped in astrology, theosophy, and metaphysical speculation. The other is an algorithmically optimized internet subculture obsessed with jawlines, canthal tilt, and engagement metrics.

Both begin with the same premise: beauty is not merely desirable—it is transformative. To become beautiful is to become a fundamentally different kind of person, someone who occupies a different social reality. Beauty isn’t just attractive; it confers access, authority, even a kind of transcendence.

Von Mierers needed an entire cosmology to explain his philosophy of beauty and power to his followers. Eternal Values wasn’t simply a modeling agency with eccentric beliefs. It was an elaborate worldview in which physical beauty reflected hidden laws of the universe. Astrology, reincarnation, esoteric philosophy, racial typologies, and spiritual evolution were all woven together into a comprehensive theory of life, power, aesthetics, and spirit. There was a real content to the worldview—even if it was astrology and theosophy, which most people are skeptical of, they are traditions with thousands of years of history, spanning all the cultures on the planet.

Looksmaxxing, by contrast, has no history, no content—it is a manifestation of digital culture, and as evanescent as streaming is. The structure of the belief—from Eternal Values to today’s looksmaxxers—remains intact, while its intellectual content has evaporated.

Well maybe that’s not quite fair—looksmaxxers do have some content, but it’s almost entirely scientized. Listening to them is all technical vocabulary. Gonial angles. Canthal tilt. Philtrum length. Maxillary projection. Orbital vector. LeFort osteotomies. Genioplasty. Buccal fat removal. It's like sitting in on a craniofacial surgery conference.

It's tempting to see looksmaxxing as radically more rational than something like Eternal Values. After all, it speaks the language of anatomy rather than astrology, surgeons rather than mystics. But culturally, they perform remarkably similar functions. Both borrow the prestige of an authoritative knowledge system in order to transform subjective aesthetic preferences into objective truths. Frederick von Mierers enlisted metaphysics. Clavicular enlists medicine. In both cases, beauty becomes something more than taste—it becomes destiny, validated by whatever discipline a particular age considers most authoritative.

But I think that looksmaxxing is far more nihilistic—with medical science vocabulary as its only content—than Eternal Values, drawing from theosophy and metaphysics, was. Not because it is less elaborate, but because its horizon is so much narrower.

Frederick von Mierers believed beauty pointed beyond itself. Beauty was bound up with spiritual development, cosmic order, reincarnation, hidden laws of history, even the destiny of civilization. However eccentric or delusional those ideas may have been, beauty ultimately served something larger than itself.

Looksmaxxing rarely asks what beauty is for. The answer is taken to be self-evident: more attention, more status, more sex, more followers. The metaphysics have been replaced by metrics.

That is, perhaps, the defining transformation. Every era recruits its most prestigious body of knowledge to legitimize beauty. Eternal Values borrowed from the occult, theosophy, and esoteric philosophy because those traditions promised access to hidden realities. Looksmaxxing borrows from orthodontics, plastic surgery, genetics, and evolutionary psychology because medicine has become our culture’s highest epistemic authority. One looked to the stars. The other looks to the CT scan.

Yet for all its scientific vocabulary, looksmaxxing feels strangely thinner and evacuated of content. It can explain the optimal gonial angle with extraordinary precision, but it has almost nothing to say about why beauty should matter beyond the obvious rewards of modern life. It has exchanged metaphysics for anatomy, transcendence for optimization.