IT’S a secret society that claims that its followers descended from a “master Aryan race” on Atlantis and that ­humans once lived on the moon.

Homosexuality is banned, corporal punishment encouraged and members atone for bad karma in past lives. Young women, denied higher education, are often married off to older men in the group, former members say.

Some male devotees have ­undergone weapons training to prepare for the end of the world, which is coming soon.

But this doomsday cult isn’t hidden away in some rural ­bunker — it operates out of a brownstone in New York.

Every Thursday evening, dozens of congregants line up on East 35th Street for the group’s weekly meeting. Their leader of the flock, Tom Baer, 73, preaches from the centre of the room, reading from pieces of paper. Members don’t have religious texts to follow along and aren’t allowed to take notes.

In official documents, the 200-member, tax-exempt church is called Congregation for the Light. To members, it’s just “the Light.”

The group has about 200 members in New York, and there are congregations in Washington, DC, and Atlanta. Baer and ex-followers say: “It’s the cult next door to every New Yorker, and no one even knows that it’s there,” said an ­exiled member.

The former worshipper, a Manhattan woman who spoke on the condition of ­anonymity because she fears retribution, joined the group in 2003 while dating a man who was raised in it.

“I totally wanted to know what was going on,” she said, adding that her boyfriend assured her it was “nothing creepy ... just the basic tenets of all religions.”

The deeper she got, the more sceptical she became.

Baer spoke to her of battling evil people in lucid dreams and how cancer and other illnesses were the result of karma, not health habits, genetics or environment. She noted Baer’s repeated, odd mispronunciation of “awry” as ­“ow-ree.”

The Light dates back to at least the 1960s and has met in New York’s Murray Hill since the ’70s, though members are taught that the church dates to the 19th century. Much of what the group believes is shrouded in secrecy, though former members say it has a lot to do with karma, reincarnation and the end of the human race.

The former worshipper was shocked that attendance at weekly meetings was mandatory; absences for vacation or higher education were not excused. When she asked a fellow member if her teenage daughter would ­attend Harvard or Yale, the woman responded: “What are you talking about? She’ll go to a local community college. She has to attend Thursday-night meetings.”

She was warned not to share the Light with others, and she kept her membership secret from her closest friends.

“Everything is ambiguous,” she said. “And if you ask, you’re told, ‘You just don’t remember. You’ll remember when you’re supposed to ... Try to control your dreams, and tonight you’ll remember a symbol.’ ”

But she wouldn’t stop asking questions.

During a meeting at the end of the year, ­everyone was handed a white ­envelope — except for her. The next day, she joined her boyfriend, who had since become her fiancé, and his parents for dinner.

The food wasn’t even served before her ­fiancé’s mother stood at the table and announced: “If you think you’re marrying him, you’re nuts. I remember you from 10,000 years ago, and you tried to bring down the Light.

“We are launching a spiritual intervention to save his soul,” the would-be mother-in-law said.

Shattered, the young woman was driven home and told never to speak to her fiancé again. Two months later, he was married off to a fellow Light member.

The white envelopes had been invitations to a special meeting to sabotage her engagement to the man who brought her into the Light in the first place.

“I felt like I was in a movie,” she recalled. “I didn’t realise the kind of power Tom [Baer] had. That the Light had.”

Paul Arthur Miller was 18 when he found himself among a dozen young men in a secluded nook of the Adirondack Mountains. He had received instructions on what to pack for the three-day trip reserved only for elite members of the “Light Patrol.”

The troop was led by two ­believers, ex-Army paratroopers who taught the youngsters how to track footprints, the basics of camping and other survival skills.

He didn’t realise the training would include firing M14 automatic rifles into an abandoned junk heap or training in hand-to-hand combat in preparation for the apocalypse.

“The belief is that Planet Earth will be ending soon and we would have to defend our people and safeguard our food and supplies,” recalled Miller, now a ­58-year-old West Village writer.

“They changed the doomsday date at least twice,” he said. “We were told it was imminent, weeks or months. People in the cult wouldn’t have dental work done because they thought, ‘Why bother?’ ”

Miller was born into the group and worked 17 years for Baer’s furniture company in Harrison, Westchester County, which employed many Light members. “I felt like a prisoner,” Miller said. “I felt like an indentured slave.”

He stayed through the tenures of two Light leaders across 30 years — each with his own agendas and “personal beliefs.”

“I didn’t start living until I left the Light,” Miller said. “I want people to know it’s OK to leave, to reclaim their independence of thought and pursue their own life dreams.”

Another ex-follower, who requested anonymity, said he was booted from his home at age 15 because he questioned the teachings and refused to throw away his Black Sabbath records.

“They believe in a master Aryan race ... that lived on Atlantis,” he said, adding that black, red and yellow races existed, but a blue race was wiped out. “Once you get to a certain level, they start to tell you these things.

“They think they are otherworldly,” he added. “They carry themselves like they’re robotic ... they’re not of this earth, everything else is filth and [they] don’t want to associate.”

Baer, a charming and sharply dressed man who uses a cane and believes he was an Apache in a past life, denies the group is a “cult.”

“We’re not a religion. We’re what a church should be,” said the Ohio native. “The principles are to have a decent, sane and healthy life and to be responsible for our own actions.

“You can’t do that in one life,” he added. “It’s impossible.”

Baer denied that the group supports corporal punishment, but said, “If I want to spank my kids, it’s no one else’s business ... Even Jesus said, ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child.’ But it’s not what you do first.”

The preacher said that children aren’t indoctrinated until they are teens and that if a child dies before age 13 it’s because they committed suicide in a previous life.

Congregation for the Light runs a non-profit named after Kates, who died in the late 1970s. The foundation’s address is at a Brooklyn auto shop.

Baer, who lives on an upper floor of the Light’s brownstone, said the non-profit gets 10 per cent of its funds from donations and the rest from estates when members die. The group pays for members who are down on their luck and for their home care.

“It’s not a cult. It’s not a scam,” Baer said. “You can come 3,000 times and you’re not going to have to pay a dime.”

This is an edited extract of an article that originally appeared on the New York Post and is republished here with permission.