Part One: John of God: Oprah's Favorite Ghost-Channeling Rapist Surgeon

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
It's Robert Evans behind the Bastards podcast. This is introduction,
not very good. I like it. Thank you, Sophie, thank
you for lying about it being a good introduction. But
you know it is good, certainly better than my introduction.
Is our guest for today, Mr Andrew T. Fuck yeah,

(00:29):
what's up? I'm alive. Can't kill me yet? Nope, nope, can't.
So you have made it through the rona so far, Andrew? Yeah, yeah,
I have to say your hair looks as badly in
need of a cut as mine does. Yeah. I can't decide,
are you. I'm like debating whether to just shoot the

(00:50):
moon and grow it to like donatable lengths. Yeah, yeah,
shave my head. I don't know. It's it's unpleasant. It's
it's at the very unpleasant point of the growth. Like it.
It's like, yeah, I hate it back in my neck.
It's fucking discussed. It's terrible. But we could do what
if we did like a locks of love things, But
instead of for people who need hair, it's for like

(01:12):
weird horny people on the internet. Yeah yeah, oh yeah,
yeah yeah. We raise money for some charity. I don't
know what kind of charity, Like, uh, bomb's not food.
Maybe that sounds like a charity. I mean, it could
be like sort of an only fan situation. Yeah, the
recording of cutting it will be will be useful to somebody. Yeah,

(01:33):
that'll be a SMR for some very weird person. And yeah,
so Andrew Andrew Andrew. As a general rule, when you
and I get together, we talk about a horrific story
of colonial genocide, um, which is what our friendship has
been based on up until this point, even before the podcast.

(01:54):
That's the hard Yeah, I would just call you randomly
in the middle of the night and be like, if
you heard about what they did to Haiti, I'd be like, Nope,
let's hear it today. Though, Today we have a story
that's horrible, really really horrible. But it's actually a little
bit of a reverse though, because it's like, in part
the story of this weird belief system from Europe being adopted,

(02:19):
uh honestly by people in a colonized nation and then
used to justify horrific misbehavior on behalf of quote leaders.
So that's kind of cool. Yeah, yeah, cool. Yeah, I
guess you could call it a type of I don't know,
I don't even know what to call this. It's a
real motherfucker of a story though. Um, this is the

(02:41):
tale of John of God. Have you ever heard of
John of God? I've heard of neither John nor God,
So okay, no John of God. Now people might be confused.
There's an actual like Jesus E guy, like a Catholic
person called John of God. I think he's a saint
or some ship. This is not that guy. Uh, this
is a modern uh spiritual medical grifter repeatedly endorsed by

(03:06):
Oprah Winfrey, who turned out to be a mass rapist
and possibly a baby farmer. So that is, uh, that's
what we're getting into today. You're welcome and yeah, thanks
for having me Jesus Christ. Yeah, yep, it's it's gonna
be an interesting tale today. Um. But before we get

(03:29):
into John of God's story, we have to go back
in history to the mid eighteen hundreds and to a
man with what I would have to say is one
of the most unreasonably cool names I've ever come across
in my research. Are you ready for this name? You're
not run his name? Nobody's ready for this fucking name.
Hippo light Leon Dennis Ard Reveil. That is a fucking

(03:50):
name Hippo light Leon Dennis Ard Reveil. That is a
fucking name. Like it's like, so what I like like
going like subtle on the on the final landing. It's
just like, yeah, we could do it normal. I like this.
Fully fifty percent of his four names sound like Pokemon.

(04:12):
I've got a Hippolyte, I've got a Denizards so Hippolte
Leon Denizard Revel was a French educator and he wrote
under the markedly less cool pin name Alan Cardek, which
I don't understand. If you're Hippo lightly on Dennizard Revel,
you lean into that ship like this guy did not
know what was clickable. Very frustrating. That's wild. Yeah, that's

(04:34):
giving up speaking as a guy who's named after fucking
the Godfather. Guy, Like like that's that you don't give
up the gift of a name that cool. Very frustrated.
So anyway, under the boring name Alan Cardeck, he wrote
a series of books about spirits and and cardex core
contention was that all living animals were inhabited by immortal

(04:54):
spirits that bounced around from body to body over the
ceaseless AONs uh. Cardek also believed that spirits could become
disembodied through a variety of causes, and that these free
spirits could impact the world in positive and negative ways.
Cardex theories became the religion of Spiritism, which is still
practiced around the world today. Uh, and it is particularly

(05:15):
popular for reasons I don't really understand. In Brazil it
has something like three million adherents there. Damn, yeah, that is,
I guess it. It's it's sort of like, uh, French
version of sort of like an animistic type religion, right
there's yeah. I think I think you're you're you're very
keen to recognize that, because I suspect it has a

(05:36):
lot to do with that, and usually spirit is m
winds up being kind of like a Spiritist Christian hybrid um,
and it does. You're right, it kind of does, because
a lot of these places had sort of animus traditions
prior to Europeans coming in and fucking ship up, and
so Spiritism felt like this kind of genuine synthesis of
these old traditions with you know, the new Christianity. I

(05:58):
think you're probably onto something there. I guess that's kind
of the ship that happened with like Catholicism in South America,
where it basically became Saints became a pantheon, yeah, or
the Polytheism. It's like, yeah, it's fine, just a slight
emotion and there everyone's the same. Yeah, it's whatever. So

(06:19):
we don't hear a lot about spiritism today in the
United States, and probably the reason why is that, um,
a sizeable number of what we're originally the religion's chief
pillars have just become normal facets of like fringe spirituality.
Like a lot of stuff that was originally part of
this spiritualism religion that Cardik cooked up just kind of
became things that like people who like crystals all believe

(06:40):
yeah yeah yeah yeah um yeah. And even Christianity kind
of like mainstream evangelical Christianity and the United States has
even absorbed a number of spiritist beliefs, or at least
different Christian cults around the world have done that. Uh.
And in a number of places, including Brazil, this has
led to spiritual healers becoming a very big deal. Spiritual

(07:01):
healers are individuals who claim to be able to carry
out magical healing sessions because their bodies act as conduits
for dead medical doctors, saints, and sometimes just God himself.
Now in the United States, this is often seen in
Pentecostal communities, who I talk about a lot because people
need to know more about them they do. Have you
ever seen like spiritual surgery sessions? Oh shit, Um, I

(07:25):
feel like I I can imagine it, but I can't
think of one. But yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's kind
of like like laying on of hands type ship and
laying on of hands. But then they'll like pull their
hands away. They'll be like, oh, there's a tuba inside,
you know, the god the Devil's put a tumb around
ya hot And they'll pull their hands away and they'll
have like a bunch of bloody pieces of meat in

(07:46):
their hands, and it's almost it's it's always like chicken
or something like they get guts from like an animal
and they do sleight of hand like magicians ship to
make it look like they're kind of like that guy
in Temple of Doom pulling out you know, right right oregon. Um. Yeah,
Like that's that's a big thing in the United States. Um.
And it's it's it's cool. It's a big thing in

(08:08):
the parts of the United States that I'm gonna guess
most people don't know anything about. Like most Americans would
be like, this isn't a big thing in the United States,
but you're wrong, I mean it is. It is like
nice how the state of the art of like sixteenth
century magic has kind of remained the same. Yeah. If
you can palm a chicken heart, you can get away
with a lot. Yeah. The most important thing to realize

(08:31):
about just the world is that people have never been
dumber than they are now, and they have never been
smarter than they are now. Human intelligence, regardless of the
actual amount of knowledge that exists, is a flat plane.
Um yeah, yeah, yeah, so yeah. Spiritual surgery is a
thing that happens here in the United States, and it's
a thing that happens all over the world. Various kinds

(08:53):
of spiritual healing traditions have existed since time immemorial. There's
like a whole tradition of it over in India that
has nothing to do with Christianity. It's like ship like
this has been happening for thousands of years, right, Um,
But over in Brazil, a combination of Spiritism and Christianity
has created a thoroughly unique tradition of what is generally
called psychic surgery. Now. Unlike most similar traditions around the world,

(09:16):
in Brazil, this psychic surgery often includes real cutting, with
surgeons using actual knives on the eyes and bodies of
their patients. So that's a cool that's fucking crazy. Oh god,
I mean, I guess it's like on some level, it's

(09:37):
got to be a little bit similar to like, you know, um,
an alchemy thing, where it's like, you know, sometimes the
problem is just a little blood letting is needed or
like she's building up and like that will work occasionally. Yeah,
and it's kind of like you know, um, people who
for like whatever reason, because of like a depressive disorder,

(09:57):
cut themselves. Um, like they feel they like they tend
to feel relief for one reason or another. And it's
like because it releases endorphins and stuff. So like you
do that in the context of a powerful religious experience
and it can feel really good to people. Um yeah,
So anyway, Yeah, the Brazilian to first pioneer this technique

(10:19):
was Jose Pedro di Feritas or ze Rigo. According to
his autobiography and obviously problematic source, he started working at
a mine until age fourteen. Uh in nineteen fifty at
age twenty nine. Um Or he started working in on
mine at age fourteen, and in nineteen fifty, when he
was twenty nine, he began to suffer a series of
blinding headaches followed by hallucinatory trances. Uh. This all culminated

(10:42):
in his body being taken over by the spirit of
a bald German Man in a white apron with a
massive team of spectral doctors and nurses at his beck
and call. He was getting like a whole German surgery
team in his head. Uh. Christ, Now, this this man
jical dead German was Dr Adolf Fritz, a field medic

(11:03):
in the German Army who died in the trenches in
nineteen eighteen. UM, which is cool. So it's it's it's
bizarre that like this Brazilian mine worker would choose like,
it's got to be a German field medic. That's that.
But that's that's what he picks. Um. And I guess
we all considered Germans trustworthy. I can't think of anything

(11:24):
in history that would make me not trust German doctors. Um.
So yeah, that's scans. So together, Dr Fritz and zi
Rigo had a wildly successful twenty year career performing surgery
to adoring audiences of as many as eight hundred followers.
At one time, za Rigo would go into trances and
become so taken with the spirit of door Fritz that
he would grab random kitchen knives and use them to

(11:45):
cut out tumors and the like from his patients. He
became known as the Surgeon of the Rusty Knife. And
this was not like nobody was like talking shit at
him by calling if this that's a that's like that's
some ship. That's like a prison nickname. Yeah, that is

(12:06):
like a prison nickname. Yeah, like if you're if you
get like locked up, and they're like, oh man, that's
the knife. That's the rusty knife surgeon, Like that's the
dude you don't want to funk with. That's like the
butcher bill motherfucker, right, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, that's incredible. That's
that was a compliment. Yes, that was a compliment. Yeah,
because like that's that's part of the evidence to these

(12:26):
people that he's like so clearly holy and sacred, is
that it doesn't even matter that he's using a rusty
knife because and again you'll see this throughout the whole
episode and all these guys we talk about. Like part
of the thing everybody focuses on is that, like none
of his patients feel any pain, none of them get infections,
even though you know, he's just cutting them with a
dirty knife. Like that's how holy this is. Yeah, so

(12:50):
that's cool and yeah, you know, yeah, you know, blood
of Jesus that works. It's fine. Antiseptic largely. Yeah, the
blood of Jesus is profoundly antiseptic. Um. Yeah. So he
prescribed various medications, generally a mix of herbal remedies and
complete nonsense. His patients could redeem their prescriptions at a

(13:10):
local pharmacy run by his brother. The height of zia
Rigo's career came when he removed a tumor from a
popular senator. He was arrested in nineteen fifty six and
convicted of practicing medicine without a license, but he was
pardoned by the president of Brazil. In nineteen sixty two,
he was arrested and jailed again for the same thing,
but the police allowed him to continue healing from his cell.
He died wealthy and beloved in nineteen seventy one due

(13:33):
to an auto accident that his spirits failed to warn
him about. So this guy would be like an amazing
character in like a Batman video game. I feel like
he feels like real final Boss energy. Yeah yeah yeah,
but he's We're just getting started with za Rigo. So

(13:55):
za Rigo dies in nineteen ninety. This guy, Rubens Feria,
who's a forty four year old jineer and software salesman.
UM kind of looks back in history nineteen years and
it's like, this guy made a funkload of money. What
if I start claiming to channel the spirit of the
same dead German guy? Next up? Ruben's Ferry is like

(14:16):
Dr Fritz is in my head and he starts like
pretty soon, he's attracting crowds of a thousand people every
day to this giant hangar style building he buys and
Rio de Janeiro. His patients were renowned to feel no
pain even when he cut into them, and they reportedly
never gotten infections from all of his eyeball scraping and
body gouging. Christopher Reeves is reported to have visited Mr

(14:36):
Ferrier for healing. Um it didn't work. Boom too soon,
but boom yeah, I mean just I'm not making a joke.
It's just it clearly didn't do the trick. Yeah, seriously, Yeah,
I mean that's a bummer. He seemed like a nice guy,
but yeah, this was not the not the treatment. So

(14:57):
uh in Mr fer Area married Rita Costa at age
thirty four. He dumped her a few years later for
a nineteen year old friend of his daughter's. Mrs Coasta,
reported her former husband to the police for nonpayment of taxes.
The police confronted him during a surgery in Rio and
arrested his bodyguard for possession of an illegal weapon. That
bodyguard then testified that he'd been secretly helping his boss

(15:20):
dispose of the corpses of a number of patients who
died as a result of Mr ferry Is hacking on
their bodies. So it turned out like a bunch of
people were dying and getting infected in his body guard
was just throwing them in a hole. I guess I
was gonna say, like, what does it take to have
the confidence to just cut people with the fucking rusty knife?
And I guess it is. You just have to You

(15:41):
have to break a few eggs to make it. You know,
I've always said there's no nothing builds confidence. Like having
a large, heavily armed man willing to dispose of corpses
for you. That really, that's all any of us really needs.
That's I guess that's you. For most people that I know,

(16:04):
I mean, yeah, I'll do a little bit of corpse disposal,
you know, it's like a yeah. So a raid on
Ruben's Ferries compound revealed more than a thousand boxes of
conventional prescription medications, suggesting that the spiritual healer was actually
practicing traditional medicine, just without a license. He was arrested
in jail, but while his district police chief agreed that

(16:26):
Farius needed to be locked up, he still professed a
strong belief in the myth of Dr Fritz, telling the Guardian,
in my opinion, I think that Dr Fritz does exist,
but that Rubens Feria is doing things that he shouldn't,
so I think he's really channeling this German guy. But
that doesn't mean he's not permitted crimes too. Oh my God,
really threatened the needle. Thanks. Yeah. My favorite is that

(16:49):
that reminds me a little bit of um. I've known
various people that have gotten out of scientology, and the
worst of them sometimes say should That is basically akin
to like, well, I don't agree with all the homophobia
and all the cult stuff, but obviously Zeno is real
and you know, controls our lives through us here you
know ship like that where I'm like, you know, it's

(17:11):
it's like it's just about the practice of it, not
like the underlying like yeah, it's amazing. Hey, I mean
you know, I I I worship l. Ron Hubbard not
for his spiritual teachings or or any of the things
he wrote about space aliens, but for his ability to
get boats full of young people to search for gold
that his past life buried. That's exactly that's what I

(17:32):
celebrate about L. R. H um. Yeah. So yeah, this
all is the background I think that's necessary to understand
John of God. So November seventeen, Oprah magazine writer Susan
Casey published an article about her visit to Brazil, where
she met with the country's new hottest psychic surgeon, Oh

(17:55):
Boy Joo Txra DeFaria, better known as John of God.
This sparked a visit by Oprah herself and an avalanche
of uncritical positive stories about how cool this new John
of God guy was. For the first time, a Brazilian
psychic surgeon attracted mass interest outside of Brazil, but foreigners
had been trickling into the country for years before that,

(18:17):
and one of them, an American named Heather Cumming, wrote
a book about John of God, the man who became
her guru. It is a thoroughly uncritical work of puffery
from a woman who clearly worships her subject. But it's
also our best real source or best source on the
early life of John of God. So I'm gonna start
by reading from that, uh, and I'm gonna give the
caveat that this information, this is all information that a

(18:39):
mass rapist cult leader wanted to convey about his early life.
So you know, noted a little bit of salt here
here and there. So uh jual Tick. Sara DeFaria was
born on June twenty, nineteen forty two, in the poor
village of oh Boy Cachoeira di Fumacha in the state
of Goyas in central Brazil. His mother, Donna Luca, was

(19:02):
a popular member of the community and a dedicated housewife. Uh.
John of God would later speak highly of his mother,
and I have no reason to suspect she wasn't a
nice person. Other than perhaps the fact that her boy
grew up to a mass raping cult leader. The biography
of John of God continues quote in the nineteen forties
and fifties, there were no paved roads or infrastructure in
this part of Brazil. The roads connecting the towns were

(19:23):
dirt studded with cattle grids and wound their way through
farms and villages. When construction of paved roads began in
the late nineteen fifties, Joel's mother ran a small hotel
and cooked for the road workers to augment the family's
meager income. Joel often says that his mother became famous
for her delicious cooking. His father was less successful. He
was a tailor and known to laundry business, but money
was not great, and young Joel and his four brothers

(19:44):
and one sister lived in constant economic anxiety. Young John
had to work from an early age, starting as a
cloth cutter in his father's shop at age six. He
only attended two years of primary school before economic necessity
forced him to end his formal education and take up
a series of increasingly brutal jobs. Now, that's what his
biography says. That's not the only version of that. We

(20:06):
have a two thousand five ABC News profile on him.
Uh notes that, based on interviews with people from his
hometown uh quote, he is said to have been so
rebellious that he was thrown out of school after the
second grade and could not keep a job. So that's
a different version of his background. But probably either way.

(20:26):
Ship ship was Yeah, he had to he had to
do some ship. He got off to some ship and
did some ship. Yeah. And the age of seven. Yeah,
and he had basically no school. And he never learns
to read or write. That's that's that's the important thing here. Um. Yeah,
never not a not a reader, this guy so um.
His biographers, though, claimed that he worked many jobs as

(20:49):
a well digger, as a bricklayer, and you know, generally
they say that he spent his late childhood and early
adolescence in hard manual labor. Uh. He learned how he
never learned to read a write, but he did learn
how to play pool, and this fided him with something
of an escape from the dreary existence poverty had forced
upon him. John's biographer claims that he was a brilliant
natural clear voyant who earned pocket money by actively prophesizing

(21:11):
events at the pool hall. Yeah, this is very funny
because she notes that quote after being given money, he
would return to the pool hall. He is an excellent
pool player to this day. And I can't prove what
I'm going to say next to in any way, but
my suspicion is that there is a germ of truth
to this, but that he's not clear voyant John just

(21:31):
discovered he had a knack for pool hustling and various
forms of cheating that required quick hands and charm. This
is a guy who would go up to spend his
life doing sleight of hand stuff to giant crowds. The
fact that he's he's a pool hustler as a kid
makes total sense. So I think that's what's actually going
on here, is he's like, yeah, he learns how to
hustle at a pool hall. Oh, it's also like you

(21:53):
can the range of predictable items of things that could
happen in a pool hall is like, yeah, finite and
like less than thirty. I would say, I feel like
you could just shoot shoot a lot of shots in
the dark, and that ship is going to come true
eventually pretty quickly. Yeah, yeah, so yeah, he he spends
a lot of time as a kid in the pool hall,

(22:15):
he learned sleight of hand. He learns how to had
a grift. Um and yeah the yeah. So So far
the biographical information that we've got from his his biography
by his follower, Heather Coummings has been broadly reasonable. Um.
This changes with this next paragraph quote. He also remembers
walking into the fields with the villagers and pointing to

(22:37):
roots and plants that would heal their ailments. The first
recorded occasion of Joel's paranormal abilities took place when he
was nine years old, while he was visiting family in
the town of Nova Ponte with his mother. It was
a beautiful, cloudless day, but Joel had a premonition that
a huge storm was coming. He began pointing out houses,
including the houses of his brother, and saying that they
would be blown down or lose their roofs. He urged
his mother to leave before the storm. Although she was

(22:58):
not convinced, she humored her son and they sought refuge
in a friends home nearby. Exactly as he had predicted,
the thunderstorm appeared seemingly out of nowhere and badly damaged
or destroyed about forty houses in a small town, and
depending on where you find this story, he always claims
a different number of houses were destroyed, So I don't know. Yeah,
so he he predicts a storm. This is his first,

(23:20):
his first case of of clairvoyance um. But despite being
clairvoyance and able to read storms in the sky, he
found himself still forced to labor in order to get by.
At age sixteen, he moved to a city, Campo Grande,
and to try and make a living. He was only
successful and fits and starts, and before long he found
himself unemployed and living under a bridge at the edge

(23:41):
of town. One day, he headed to the water to bathe,
and John claims as he approached the water, a beautiful
woman called to him and invited him closer. They talked
for hours. The next day he returned to the water
to speak with her again, but he found a brilliant
shaft of light in her place. He heard her calling
his name, and so he approached. She told him to
visit the speed Rotists Center in Campo Grande, which he did.

(24:03):
So that's that's that's that's his version of events. The
spirit meets him and they talk for hours, and then
she sends him to the spirited center in town. Um,
so like, yeah, he arrives in the director of the
center like knows his name already and uh says they've
been waiting for him. And then John immediately like collapses,
he like passes out. And when he returns to consciousness, Um,

(24:26):
there's this huge group of people standing around him and
they tell him that he has incorporated, which is the
term they use for when you're you're taken over by
a spirit, the entity King Solomon. Uh. And he cured
fifty people while possessed by King Solomon, which I remember
King Solomon as the guy who cuts up babies. But
I don't know. And as far as like the luck

(24:47):
of the draw goes, Hey, that's a good get good
get k s. That's a big one. Yeah, he could
have happened. Anyone could have happened, anyone, amazed could have
happened to anyone. I mean, I would love to I
don't know, not King Solomon. Which king would I want
to Henry the Eighth, Henry the eight, that's a good

(25:11):
that's a I mean, that's a bad king, but that's
a fun king to or I could write a tricycle. Yeah,
I guess uh, I guess uh. The old dude, the
old old dude from the Bible. He probably got up
to some ship. You mean, like the Babylonian emperor. Yeah,

(25:34):
that's a good one, right, those guys, those guys, yeah, man,
And it's so much more impressive to take on Nebuchadnezzar.
That guy's gets a way better named than Solomon. Yeah.
So yeah, obviously this is all lies. The only truth
here is probably that John's age sixteen is about when

(25:55):
John started fooling around with spirit is Um. Unfortunately, I'm
unaware of any serious journalism that exists to actually document
what down what went down with John's early years in
the religion. But he claims that the director of the
center had to take him aside and explained to him
that he had been chosen by an entity of light
known as King Solomon. Uh. This director told him to
leave and come back at two pm the next day

(26:16):
to keep healing people. Since John was homeless, this guy
invited him to stay the night at his house. John
claims that this man's humble home and food were unthinkable
luxuries for him, given the poverty he lived with his
entire life. He was given his own room with an
electric fan, so that's a big deal. Nice electric fan.
It is like so weird to think about, like the
band of Grifters welcoming in and you, I mean this

(26:38):
is in the retelling welcoming in Grifter, Like, what the
fuck was actually happening? Yeah, and it's one of those things. Yeah,
it's convenient that you know out in the at this
period of time, out in the middle of nowhere, Brazil. Um.
You know, lifespans aren't enormous. Uh so you're you're really
if you make it old enough, you could just about

(27:00):
what happened to you when you were a kid, because right, yeah, right,
right right, that makes sense that. Yeah, the the earlier
most people die, the easier it is to be a grifter. Yes,
when everyone I go to went to high school with
his dead, I'm going to have some stories I started telling.
I'll tell you that much. Yeah, I was healing the
ship out of people in eleventh grade. You want to

(27:25):
take an ad buddy, Yep, you know who else was
healing a lot of people when I was in the
eleventh grade. Okay, so uh now let's talk about um products.
Note we did that. Now we're back, okay, So johnnah,

(27:48):
God he meets this Spirited Church, and they tell him
that King Solomon's taken over his brain. Um, and he's like,
that's that's good and normal, um and yeah. So he
winds up staying the night with like the leader of
the center. Uh. And he tries to explain to him
that he's not a practicing medium and he doesn't know
anything about medicine, and he doesn't understand how he was

(28:09):
healing all these people. He was actually terrified because he
didn't know like how to he was expected to come
back the next day, and he didn't know how to
do what was expected of him. Um. But as soon
as he gathered at the spirit to Center the next day, uh,
King Solomon took him over again and he kept healing
more sick people. John claims this went on for months
while the more experienced spirits practitioners educated him on the
nature of the entities that increasingly took over his body.

(28:31):
He became known as Medium John and his new teachers
it is kind of funny, Medium John. It's like the
sequel to Big John. That's not as as good or rhythmic. Me.
Just me. Every morning at the mind you could see
him arrive. He stood five ft eight and Wade one

(28:53):
thirty five kind of medium at the shoulders and medium
at the hips, and everyone knew it was okay to
give some lip to medium. Him John, It's so it
is like so juvenile to find confusing medium with medium.
But I know it's funny. It's very funny. So his

(29:14):
his new teachers told him he needed to devote his
whole life to healing other people. Um, and this is biographer.
His biographer's claim started a five or six year period
of traveling throughout Brazil healing the sick and the suffering.
He became known as Joel Curador or John the Healer.
Through his biographers and in interviews, John always make sure
that people know that he is a healer. But he

(29:34):
also at the same time all always firmly rejects being
called a healer. Um. So he makes sure that people
knows that, like everyone started calling me John the Healer,
but I'm not a healer. The entities that channel through
my body are the ones doing the healing. I'm just
a conduit. It's very important to him that you believe
both things. Um. Yeah. So this has a nice side

(29:55):
benefit of allowing him to argue that he isn't practicing
medicine without a license, which is is handy when you're
act to saying medicine without a license. I don't know
if you've ever practiced medicine without a license, but you
gotta be careful with it. That is, so he's shifting
the blame to literal King Solomon essentially. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
If somebody dies while he's performing psychic surgery, it's the

(30:16):
dead King's fault. M hm. That's a that's a hell
of a loophole. That's genius. I mean, I am going
to start blaming all of my many crimes on King Solomon.
I'm I'm not I'm not gonna I'm not even gonna
lie to you about that. Like I that seems like
a very good idea, especially the baby chopping thing, because
that's he's got the baby chopping, he's got the previous

(30:38):
on that. Yeah, I mean, yes, officer, I was going
a hundred and thirty five miles an hour in a
fifty five. But if I didn't, this fucking king ghost
in my head was going to chop up some babies.
Like do you want me to go a little faster?
You want some chopped up babies? That's all I gotta
ask you, yeah, yeah, to you, up to you cop
to me. You want me to heal you, let me

(30:59):
pull out some chicken gizzards and pretend to rip them
from your chest. So his biographer's next note that he
did that. While he did his extraordinary work of healing.
Medium John was persecuted by members of the medical and
religious establishments UH. He claims that they were threatened by
his presence and that he lost count of the number

(31:19):
of times he was arrested for practicing medicine without a license.
John traveled constantly, never more than a few steps ahead
of the law. He finally got a break in nineteen
sixty two when Brazil was thrown into turmoil via violand coup.
His biography says the country suffered a revolution and a
military government came into power. The reality is that Brazil's
democratically elected socialist president, Joel Guler, was overthrown by a

(31:42):
military coup backed by the U. S Government. A conservative
military dictatorship but rule Brazil for the next twenty years.
John's biography glosses all over over all of that, because
the advent of a military dictatorship worked out really well
for him. Medium John traveled to the capital Brazilia and
offered his services as a tailor to the military quote
from his biography. Because he was so young, he was

(32:04):
not commissioned to create uniforms, but was given an opportunity
to so a consignment of work pants. His expertise to
impressed his new employers, and he was soon promoted to
full time tailor and assigned to make uniforms for the army.
Medium Joel continued his healing work quietly on the side,
but word of his gifts soon spread throughout the barracks.
One day, he incorporated an entity who operated on the
wounded leg of a doctor, which healed immediately. The doctor

(32:27):
was enthralled with Medium Joel's gift, and from that day
on he became the spiritual healer for the military and
civil authorities. He was promoted a master tailor and became
their protege for nearly nine years. Consequently, he was protected
from persecution during that time and traveled extensively throughout Brazil
with the army. There's a lot that's interesting there. The
most fascinating thing to me is that so the army
comes to believe that this is a magical healer and

(32:49):
As a result, they promote him to Master Taylor, which
is this is an interesting choice. I mean it's just
like keep him in the ranks, I guess, yeah, keeping
the ranks, keep a page going to the guy. Well
you dictatorship, Brazil. Look, I'm not gonna backseat dictatorship. You
know what, there's a lot of bureaucracy. You can't just

(33:11):
insert like witch doctor surgeon general. Yeah you get that's
like a year eight of the dictatorship thing at best.
You know, you gotta oh my god, I want to
be witch doctor surgeon General so bad. That's just that
sounds even better than reverend Doctor. To be honest, you
just have to. Yeah, you have to work within the
available structures and tell until such time as you don't. Yeah. Yeah,

(33:35):
I got really fucked up fighting those partisans the other night.
I got a bullet my arm. I gotta go to
the Master Taylor to deal with this. Yeah. So, John
claims that the experience of working as a protege healer
slash tailor with the Dictatorship instilled in him a deep
desire to become a successful businessman. His fonding biographers explained

(33:57):
that he quote needed money making expertise, to support his
spiritual purpose. This is so he doesn't sound greedy. Um. Wonderfully,
they claimed John just happened to have a great head
for business and his financial success has allowed him to
fund his healing mission all without charging patients and dime.
This is absolutely a lie, but incredulous white Americans bought
it for years. So basically, he like, he claims that

(34:18):
he became a great businessman and that's how he's able
to fund his his free healing hospital. The reality is
like literally the opposite. He makes a bunch of money
healing people and he used it to buy like ranches
full of cattle and stuff. Um whatever. Yeah. Now, from
this point on, the story of Medium John has a
decent amount of documentation, So we're going to depart from
his terrible, terrible biography. But before we do, I want

(34:40):
to turn to his biographers for an explanation of exactly
who these entities that take over John are. Uh. They
describe the entities as transcendent spirits who are who are
quote able to use Medium Joyl's body to produce cures
by performing visible and invisible spiritual surgeries. Quote. Medium Joel
can incorporate a approximately thirty seven entities, but only one

(35:00):
entity can be incorporated at a time. The specific entity
may change, however, depending on the needs of an individual patient.
In addition to the entity incorporated at any given time,
there is a highly evolved group of thousands of spirits
who actually work on a person while the incorporated entity
overseas healing. This group is referred to as his falange.
One spirit might specialize in diabetes or heart problems, another

(35:22):
in emotional afflictions. These entities serve humanity in the hopes
of alleviating pain and suffering on the earthly plane. This
service is part of their evolutionary process. So he's a
whole hospital of ghosts. Jesus Christ. That's having having like
support staff in this like fake like spirits the best

(35:42):
part system. It's like, I mean, I guess it makes
it sound more plausible on some level, Like how could
you possibly do this? No, we need, you know, the
help of thousands to cure your fucking whatever. Yeah, No,
I got nurses. Yeah is it ever? Like? Sorry, No,
the guy who could help you, he's out on vacation.
We just have like the dude who helps me cut

(36:04):
people's eyes. Do you need an eye cut? Yeah? Oh,
that's the other side of it is if you were, like,
if I were designing my own version of some cockamamie bullshit,
I feel like it would be it would involve as
little true body horror as possible. Like no, no, they
let people love that ship. People love getting fucking cut

(36:25):
into and blood and ship. Like, if you really want to,
if you want to, like, if you want to get
some cult ship going on, you gotta get gross with it. Man. Yeah,
it's part of it. It's part of it. But physicality, yeah, yeah, yeah,
that's why, you know, not everyone's made to be a
cult leader. Andrew, I don't think I got what it
takes anymore. I I believe you could be a cult leader,

(36:47):
but you know, it takes some sacrifice. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah,
I don't. I don't have the willingness to put in
the reps to really get good. Yeah. Yeah, there's a
lot in common. Being a cult leader has a lot
in common with having great abs, right, they both they
both take you either have to be born with the
right jeans or you have to put in a lot
of time on the bench. And it's not happening for me. Yeah,

(37:09):
well that's that's Yeah. Well, making choices. Yeah, there's not
happening yet. I'll see, We'll see what I wish. It
would be cool to be able to incorporate the spirit
that could just give you incredible abs, like one of
them has to know how to do abs. But okay. So.
John claims that after a few years of making money
and getting in good with the brutal dictatorship, his entities

(37:30):
told him it was crucial he expand his work and
heal more people. He wound up being guided to the
town of Abadyanya and Goyas. He first arrived there in
nine and began his practice by sitting in a chair
outside in the middle of the main road in greeting
travelers who showed signs of illnesses Through him. The entities
would heal these people, and over time the numbers increased
from dozens to hundreds to thousands per day. John's incredible

(37:53):
healings eventually earned him the loyalty of a mysterious benefactor,
who purchased him a plot of land and paid to
build a healing enter, Casa di dom Ignacio de Loyola,
the Spiritual Hospital is his followers would come to describe It.
Eventually received more than ten thousand visitors per month. Since
Abbadiana has only about nineteen thousand residents, the huge streams
of sick and dying people represented a big infusion into

(38:16):
the local economy. So like half the population of the
city is coming in every week just to see this guy.
Oh yeah, that's I mean, I guess you need like
desperation tourism sometimes, but Jesus Christ, that's that is actually
Jesus Christ's business model also, so you know what, maybe

(38:36):
maybe it's just a good one. Yeah. If Jesus Christ
had benefited from like roadside billboards, I don't think they
ever would have gotten to kill him. He would have
made too much money. But yeah, render and a caesar
about and you're fine, honestly. Yeah. So uh. This was
often glossed over by the positive coverage of John of God,

(38:57):
but the extent to which you became an industry for
the people who lived around on him can't be exaggerated.
I'm gonna quote now from an OH magazine profile by
Susan Casey. Uh, just a terrible article from two thousand
ten that none of the less revealed some important details
about the economic impact of this guru on the small
town of Abbadi Anya quote. Several businesses had displays of
white clothing. The castAR request that only white be worn.

(39:19):
This makes it easier, apparently, for a person's alora to
be seen. There were a number of vividly painted small
hotels lined up side by side, lilac, purple, canary, yellow,
lime green. One of them, a coral colored one story building,
opened up to the street, and inside I could see
a John of God video playing on a large screen.
An audience of about twenty people sat in straight back
chairs and watched him cut into a man's chest with

(39:40):
what looked like a rusty pairing knife. The man's eyes
were closed and he was peaceful and still, as rivulets
of blood ran down his white shirt. Yeah that's awesome.
That sounds like the kind of charming small Brazilian town.
I want a vacation and just have a couple of
fucking mohitos and watched some guy commits sur jury on people. Hell, yeah,

(40:02):
this is like some midsummer ship. This is like yeah insanity. Yeah,
imagine like you're just backpacking through Brazil and wind up
here on accident and it's like, oh no, I have
I have aired. I did not want to be here.
Yeah sh it. So John established a cattle ranch nearby,
and by the early two thousands he was known to

(40:23):
spend most of his week they're running his various businesses.
He was able to do this because increasingly throughout the
nineties and early two thousand's, a string of foreigners, generally
American women, moved in and dedicated themselves to helping his mission.
This includes the Americans who wrote his biography, John of
God's Practice and involved a series of mass meetings where
sick folks would basically phillip rooms and wait to be

(40:43):
seen by the medium. He'd consult with his entities and
then diagnosed their problem. I'm gonna quote now from a
write up in the Montreal Gazette. Quote. Once the diagnosis
has been made, the healing procedure begins. It may be
visible or invisible spiritual surgery. If the patient chooses invisible,
they are directed to a room to editate well the
spirits do their work. Visible surgery can involve sticking a
surgical clamp up the patient's nose. It looks very impressive,

(41:07):
but it is nothing but an old Carney trick, usually
performed with a long nail and a hammer. Any anatomical
text will reveal that there is a roughly four inch
long passage up the nasal cavity that is quite ready
to accommodate a foreign object without any harm. John maintains that, yeah,
that's that's a good trick. Yeah, he's doing the nails
up the nose thing. He's calling a brain surgery. Classic. Yeah. Classic.

(41:31):
John maintains that the success of his treatment hinges on
the patient abstaining from drinking alcohol, eating pork, and having
sex for forty days after the treatment. This can provide
for a convenient out in case no miracle occurs. Patients
can be healed even if they are unable to travel
to Brazil. All that is needed is a surrogate willing
to undergo the spiritual surgery. So that's awesome. That's a
good grift. God. Yeah, well, I mean I guess it's like,

(41:56):
if you're gonna be a main grifter, at least bring
up your little grifty town and around you. Yeah. Yeah,
I guess, yeah, I mean that's that's obviously the safest thing, right,
because then they'll have a vested financial interest in protecting you.
Yeah yeah, yeah, I guess that is what a cult is. Yeah,
that's basically I mean, yeah, more, I mean this is
a little more complicated than just a cult, because there's

(42:16):
a cult, but then there's also the town who, like
probably a lot of the townsfolk knew that this was bullshit,
but they also know there's a funkload of money in
this ship. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, make everyone invested in you,
and yeah, one way or the other, it's got leverage.
It's essentially the same way that like the pot industry
works and large amounts of the United States um or yeah,

(42:40):
like any drug business works, where it's like, well, this
is where the money is here, so nobody's nobody's going
to start ship. Yeah, don't don't snitch. This is this
is the don't snitch. This is good for all of us.
Yeah yeah, yeah, that's kind of what's going on here.
Um except for instead of good honest marijuana, it's a

(43:02):
guy cutting people's faces and shoving things up their noses,
and he actually hates marijuana. He was he was famous
for saying that like, if you smoked pot, you had
to like detox for a whole year before he could
heal you. The entities don't like weed. Yeah, that's can't
be true, but fair enough entities. Yeah, if there are,

(43:23):
if there are ghostly entities flying around, there's no way
those ghostly entities don't like some fucking dank like come on,
they love they love weed. So that that last right up,
I read you from the Montreal Gazette was obviously written
by a credible journalist who was his critical of who
was very critical of John of God. Um. But I
want to read another example another another person writing about

(43:44):
what his healing sessions look like, who actually like believed
in him and was a member of his cult. So
here's his biographer, Heather Cummings, recalling one of his healing sessions. Quote,
the entity Dr Jose Valdevino called for his and that's
the guy he's channeling. Is this Doctor Jose Voldavino called
for his instruments again. I opened the special drawer and
carefully removed the tray and took the instrument tray to him.

(44:07):
He chose a pairing knife, a regular kitchen serrated edge knife.
He passed his hand over the man's eye and told
him to relax. He opened the eye wide and pressed
down hard and scraped. See here it is, he said,
as he wiped the knife on the man's shirt. I
could see a minute, dark sliver. I know, beyond a doubt,
after seeing so many of these operations, that the sliver
was not a topical foreign object being removed, but rather

(44:27):
something from deep inside that only the entities can see.
The eye looks the entity looks into the eye as
a representation of the whole body system, not limited to
the physical eye. I understand this is a symbolic removal
on the physical level, but originating from many levels and
involving many different or organs. The sun is healed, you
can take him to the infirmary, he said, as he
wrote the post op prescription. So that's cool, ship, that's

(44:53):
an awesome gig, man. That is I mean, I don't
I like, I don't wear contacts because I can't it
touch my eye. I think, oh, hell you man. Yeah,
over to my house. I'll whip out a big old
rusty machette and I'll carve the ghost steadier eye. Man.
It's it's fine, this is this is where I'm taking
machettison next. Damn, that's that's an easy grist. Just start

(45:18):
slashing people's fucking faces. It's fine, Holy sh it, man.
And then Yeah. Can you imagine the first time you
try this ship like this will work. There's a lot
of blind people who were like before he learned how
to scrape people's eyes without blinding them, like he. Uh,
there's like a whole village full of his his his

(45:39):
first draft healings. Yeah, Jesus Christ, I guess all of
those people are dead. Huh yeah. I mean, you know.
The good thing is if you're actually like, if you're
doing this kind of grift, I think you definitely want
to start out only trying to heal people with serious
terminal illnesses like cancer, because then once you funk up,
they're not around very long. Right, Yeah, that's really key. Um. Yeah,

(46:03):
a lot of good advice on how to start a
medical grift in this episode, So take notes. When society collapses,
some of you are going to do very well remembering
this stuff. So um yeah. Like, as that story noted,
John of God would write prescriptions to his patients, and
all of these prescriptions were for a specific herbal pill
mixture sold in John of God's own pharmacy. The pills

(46:25):
were mostly Passion Flower, and by some accounts, they've netted
John more than ten million dollars a year. Uh he
also gets a cut of the sales of the white clothes,
the hotel fees, the sales of blessed water, and the
sales of healing crystals which he prescribes to his followers.
So you can see why no one in Abbadi Agna
had any interest in question whether or not John of
God was legit. He did face occasional challenges from members

(46:46):
of the Brazilian government, particularly folks in the medical establishment
who were leary of his psychic surgery, but this sort
of wou is extremely popular in Brazil, particularly among rural voters,
and John of God was both rich and connected, so
it is not surprising that very little was ever done.
What's more surprising is the degree to which foreign journalists
bought into his stick. In two thousand five, ABC News

(47:09):
sent a small team to Abadi Anya to meet John
of God. They put together a documentary basically posing the
question of whether or not he was a healer or
a bullshit artist, and they kind of landed on healer.
Like ABC News did a pretty shitty job of journalism
here and I'm gonna quote from this right up in
the Montreal Gazette quote and an attempt to provide a

(47:29):
critical review a view of John's antics. The producers invited
two experts, cardiac surgeon Mement Oz and James Randy, the
world's leading investigator of paranormal phenomenon. Oz was probably chosen
because he was a proponent of various alternative therapies such
as therapeutic touch and reflexology, and would be likely to
be somewhat sympathetic to faith healing and perhaps at an
air of legitimacy. Randy was invited as the token skeptic.

(47:53):
Oz appeared repeatedly in the hour long show, basically echoing
the refrain that science doesn't have all the answers, and
not all other forms of healing knee consideration. Science, of
course doesn't claim to have all the answers, but it
does look for evidence before jumping on a bandwagon. Randy,
who could have provided evidence for methods of trickery and
for psychological manipulation, was given a total of nineteen seconds
on the show after being interviewed for hours. Why because

(48:15):
the possibility that cancer can be healed by penetrating the
nose with surgical forces by healer chosen by God makes
for better television than declaring him to be a self
delusional simpleton or calculating fraud artist. So I mean this
this has to also be like something like the underlying
like you know, uh, faith in Christianity, Like you know,

(48:39):
it's like, oh you gotta you know, can't question religion,
can't question religion takes you all the way to wealth.
This could be real. This clearly fake ship could be real.
It's gotta be real. What else could it be? It's
it's it's wild man um and Dr Oz is a
big part of justifying this guy. Like you can't over

(49:00):
date how much doctor Oz played a role in giving
this guy legitimacy because his job for his whole career
pretty much has been to be a real doctor who
will get up and say that nonsense makes sense, that
nonsense medical treatments are good for you. I mean, I
think I think it's like critical to point out that like,
physicians are not fucking scientists, like you can be a

(49:22):
doctor Ben Carson believes in fucking you know, doesn't believe
in evolution, Like doctors are just like high stakes technicians. Yeah,
and and there engineers are regularly uh engineers, and doctors
actually are are not irregularly like part of like terrorist moves,
like how Kaita had a bunch of engineers and doctors

(49:42):
and because like uh they you know, if you've got
that kind of intelligent like Ben Carson is a great
brain surgeon and is also able to convince himself that
the world is six thousand years old, like the kind
of brains that these people have, don't you know. There's
a lot of very smart doctors obviously too. But you
can be a doctor and very dumb. Um, yeah, and

(50:03):
you can be a But I don't think Dr Oz
is dumb. I actually don't think that's I think Doctor
Oz is a very intelligent grifter who's made millions of
dollars causing untold harm to the world into our shared
understanding of science. The doctor oz ad comes on during
this episode. He's a piece of ship and a monster.
But I hope an ad for Dr oz comes on

(50:24):
right now. Yeah, I think. I think it's just like
worth pointing out that the T, E, M and stem um,
none of those things are indicative of actual knowledge necessarily. No,
And this is part of why like this is people
talk about like conservatives in particularly like talk a lot
of shit about the liberal arts and like philosophy and

(50:46):
all this stuff, and it's like, no, no, no, The
reason why engineers and doctors should have some grounding and
all that education is to stop doctor oz Is from
coming about, Like like, it's to give people like a
broader understanding than just like, if you get really good
at one incredibly narrow technical thing, yeah, you can convince
yourself to believe all sorts of of stupid bullshit because

(51:08):
you're a very smart person who doesn't have a wide
ranging education. And it's very easy for those sorts of
people to convince themselves of the dumbest things in the world,
and who have like who are highly rewarded for it.
So like, yeah, you watch like any Silicon Valley person
make a pronunciation on anything outside of business, and it's like, oh,

(51:29):
you are You are less educated than the average person.
You are bad at reasoning. Yeah, and when a bunch
of these people who are really good at one incredibly
narrow task wind up responsible for a wide range of things,
you have stuff like a viral epidemic get wildly out
of hand and kill tens of thousands of people. But yeah, yeah,

(51:51):
hypothetically yeah, and dr oz is of course a part
of that, and was like urging people to take bullshit
medical treatments during the coronavirus epidemic because he's he's he's
he's history's greatest monster. Um. You know. He was also
cited repeatedly in that two thousand ten OH Magazine article
because of course oprah Um gave mement Oz life and
nursed him at her metaphorical breast of publicity. Um. And

(52:14):
I'm gonna quote from that next. So this is the
right up and OH magazine that really put John of
God on the map. Quote. Five years ago, Oz had
participated in a primetime live segment focusing on John of God.
He examined hours of film footage from the entities healings.
He looked at scans and biopsy reports, and there were
results he couldn't explain the shrinkage of an aggressive tumor.
For instance, this guy has a glioblastoma, which is a

(52:36):
very deadly brain tumor. Oz recalled it was grade for
the biopsy didn't improved it as an added credential. The
biopsy was done at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, a prominent hospital.
I took those films down to my radiologist along with
a new set of films that patient had taken after
his visit to John of God, which showed the tumor
had calcified and essentially died. Now I don't know Dr
Oz is radiologist, but I do know that Dr Oz

(52:57):
himself is a fameless charlatan and a liar. I can't
speak to the specific case, but it's worth noting that
no other doctors got to look at this information. Um.
I can, however, speak about other cancers that John of
God claimed falsely to have cured. In two thousand five,
South African singer Leah Melman refused breast cancer surgery to
be treated by John of God. She claimed to have
been cured by him, and showed up on Oprah Winfrey

(53:19):
Show to tell everyone the good news about how Brazil's
miracle healer had had cured her untreatable cancer, which actually
was treatable that she just chose not to get treated.
She died of her untreated cancer two years after her
Oprah appearance in two thousand twelve. Oprah did not post
a retraction based on any of this. Of course, some
of this is probably due to the fact that there
were many, many other grateful patients all too eager to

(53:40):
come forward and share their own stories of miraculous healing.
That two thousand ten article by Susan Casey included the
stories of several charismatic foreigners who claimed to have been
cured by John and now worked for him or made
money taking groups to be healed by him. Um, I'm
gonna read one example. This is a quote from that
Oh magazine article which you can only find it on
the way back machine because once this guy got accused

(54:02):
by of rape by literally hundreds of people. Um opropole
the article, But uh, I found it on the way
back machine. And if you want to be really angry
at an unspeakably shitty journalist, and and Susan Casey is
one of the very worst who's ever ever done the job,
UH read that article because it will make you want
to punch holes in your wall. So I'm gonna read

(54:23):
a quote from it now, So get your whole punch
and hands ready over a good Chilean red Edwen, an
ordained minister, motivational speaker and author of the Four Spiritual
Laws of Prosperity, recounted the story of her brain aneurysm,
deemed inoperable by five neurosurgeons, get your affairs in order,
she remembers being told, and try not to sneeze. That's
how fragile I was, she said. So I did it.

(54:44):
I went out and got my living will, my durable
power of attorney. But then I realized I'm not ready
to go just yet, she laughed at the memory. That's
all it is. Now. After her dire diagnosis, at the
urging of her prayer group, all of whom say they
received the same vision of John of God curing her,
Ween traveled to the CASA. I was nervous and I
was skeptical, she said, but what did I have to lose?

(55:05):
Almost immediately, the entity performed invisible surgery on her, a
forty minute process that involves sitting in a group meditation
with her right hand over her heart. Nobody touched her,
but it. Ween remembers, I could feel things moving around
in my head. It didn't hurt, but it was different. Afterwards,
she collapsed in exhaustion for twenty four hours. Days later,
she was told by her guide the stitches would be

(55:26):
could would be removed. That night. I could feel ping, ping, ping,
like stitches being pulled out. Eventually, a CT scan revealed
the truth. Her aneurysm was gone. I'm so grateful, she said,
nodding towards the heavens. Since then, she's been back to
the Casa once at Christmas, and now she was headed
there for a third time, bringing a group of twenty
people who also saw at healing. So this is the

(55:47):
level of journalistic rigor that we're getting in this article.
M magazine, everybody, the mention of the wine is particularly choice. Yeah,
Oprah magazine was definitely like it was. Yeah, it was,
it was. It was entirely geared getting wine moms to

(56:07):
believe spiritual nonsense and not get their cancer treated. Jesus Christ.
I mean, Robert, you want to take an ad break
real quick? Yeah? You know what? Else doesn't care if
wine moms get cancer treatment. The products and services that
support this podcast, they don't. They don't give a good
God damn. And that's the Garrett, that's the behind the

(56:30):
bastards guarantee we're back. Oh my gosh, what a great
I don't know whatever this is. God John have got
is a monster and a rapist, and we will only

(56:50):
hear more about the horrible things that he's done. Um,
but I can't have the same kind of hatred for
him that I can for these fucking Oh Magazine grifters
and dr ah. And I don't know why. I think
it's because on like a on like a global level,
the amount of harm that these people do is so
much higher. And it's also so much like this is
gonna sound weird, but like the horrible physical crimes that

(57:11):
John of God committed, like he just went out there
and committed with his own body. Um, And there's a
level of like commitment to evil that's necessary, whereas doctor
as an Oprah just like sit in front of a
camera and say bullshit that harms so many more people. Well,
at the same time, they're perfectly friendly and nice people
and so like nobody hates them and they never go

(57:32):
to prison and like I'm not gonna say the worse
than a rapist, but yeah, you know, they do more
damage on a on a broad scale, right, Like yeah,
it's not good. Well, it's like it's like sort of
like it's like, um, it's like whatever the pr version

(57:53):
of money laundering is, they they clean it clean. Yeah, yeah, exactly,
that's exactly right there. They're like money launderers for like
dangerous bullshit that gets people killed and molested in stuff.
And they are responsible in this case for sending thousands
of potential victims to this guy who again turns out
to rape hundreds of people and like they're being sent

(58:14):
there by Oprah. But all she gets is traffic for
it and more money. And everybody loves Oprah And if
she ran for president, she would absolutely win. Um. And
it's fine, And it's just fine because she's a friendly,
nice person. I'm sure. I'm sure if I got to
hang out with Oprah, I would enjoy her company. Um,
and I would forget momentarily the horrors that her brand

(58:35):
has brought into the world. And that's very frustrating to
think about. Although to be fair, actually, if she were
to graduate to the level of American president, yeah, um,
she would once again be in company where probably, relatively speaking,
her hands are relatively clean. I and and like, I hate,
I hate to say it, but I suspect she would
not be the worst president of my lifetime. Oh my god,

(58:58):
she might be the best. Yeah. It's it's entirely possible.
Both things are true. You can be the friendly face
of a lot of horror still be the best president. Yeah.
I would still vote for her over the current guy
or even Joe Biden, to be honest. So here we go, like,

(59:19):
it's fucking wild. This is so dumb. We shouldn't have
presidents um or billionaires like Oprah. But whatever. Anyway, that
Oh Magazine article has been scrubbed from the Internet because
of all the rapes and stuff. Um, but uh yeah,
it's I almost recommend finding it and reading it just
to get a crash course and how to write a
really irresponsible article about a cult leader. Susan Casey should

(59:42):
be in some sort of journalist prison, but instead she
went from being Oprah's editor in chief to working as
the creative director for Outside Magazine, the editor of Sports
Illustrated Women, and the author of a ridiculous sounding book
on dolphins. And I am sure that I have ruined
any chance of publishing an Outside magazine now, which bums
me out. I would much rather do that than write
about Nazis. But I don't like Susan Casey, and I

(01:00:04):
think she's very irresponsible. Yeah, she's the journalistic equivalent of
like like taking your nine year old out shooting for
the first time and just getting blackout drunk first. I
mean is it, Like because it's like, so they generally
there's this like a vested interest in promoting like spirituality

(01:00:25):
and Christianity on some level. And like because it's like
when you when you encounter these people, are you are
not at any point like, hey, this seems fucked up.
I it's so wild to me that you don't that
they don't have that instant you know. The key is
that all of the people surrounding John of God, because
you don't spend much time with him, he spent a

(01:00:46):
lot of time around these like and they're mostly like
white American ladies who like love his ship. And they're
all the same kind of they're all Gwyneth Paltrow kind
of people. And they're all like like well healed and
friendly and and charming. Uh and and they know how
to speak to a specific segment of the population and

(01:01:06):
those people find them trustworthy. Um. Yeah, So Susan felt
the need to visit John of God, the author that
Oh Magazine article. Um so she could write a terrible article.
But the the the ailment that sent her there was
the fact that her father had tragically died very young. Um.
And the resultant grief had nearly broken her um. She
went to Brazil for healing, and she basically claims that

(01:01:28):
John of God put her into a trance during one
of his mass healing sessions, and she was able to
visualize her father in paradise, knowing that he was happy
and off living his eternal life allowed her to move
on and that's all fine. Like, Seriously, grief is the
worst thing ever, and there are way worse ways of
coping with it than paying a guru to help you
to hallucinate heaven or whatever. Do what you gotta do
to get by. I'm not gonna blame her for that.

(01:01:48):
What I will blame her for is the utterly uncritical
way that she wrote about John of God's bullshit, like
his claims of being able to perform surgery without even
touching people. So here's another quote. When you consider the
countless unseen things of undeniable power, sound waves, microwaves, radio waves,
emotions like anger or envy, wind, and of course the
awesome universal power of love, it seems silly to rely

(01:02:09):
on the naked eye for proof of anything, Yet that
is what we do. Numbers on charts and graphs, X
rays those we believe in, but we lieve without documentation.
Something we perceive with one of our five senses is
considered without with one of our five senses is considered
blind faith sweet, but we don't really trust it. So
she's saying that, like it's it's silly to believe in
radio waves but not the power of ghosts to heal

(01:02:31):
people's cancer. That the hand waving of naked eye into
evidence is fucking revolting. She is handwaving so hard it
could power a fucking wind bill farm, like Jesus. So
she actually makes the argument in that article that it's
unreasonable for us to reject the reality of John of
God's powers just because there's no proof behind them. This

(01:02:53):
is reinforced by something something she writes about her arrival
in the hotel at Abadyanya quote, as I hoisted my
luggage up to the second floor, a small sign of
the wall caught my attention. Don't believe everything you think
it advised, which is like that's kind of gaslighting, right,
Like it's like it's like gaslighting via decorations. Yeah, that
is exactly that is just what abusers say. That's insane. Yeah.

(01:03:19):
In this same incredulous way, she writes about the entities
that John of God channels quote. If you spend time
at Abadyanna, you will hear the phrase the entities over
and over again, sometimes plural and sometimes singular, and you
will come to use it yourself as if it were
a completely ordinary thing, to say what it actually means. However,
it is so extraordinary that it defies our sense of
what is logical or even possible in this world. The

(01:03:39):
healing entities who work through John of God are the
spirits of deceased doctors, surgeons, masters, and saints. Heather's website
explains matter of factly, they use Medium Joao's body, channeling
their power through him. Sometimes the spirits show up anonymously,
but there are several who make regular appearances. They include
Dr Augusto Dalmata, a surgeon and army man with a
serious and efficient manner. Dr Oswaldo Rus, whose specialties were

(01:04:01):
infectious diseases and bacteriology. St. Francis Xavier, co founder of
the Jesuit Order, along with CASA's patron, Saint Ignatious of Loyola,
a priest and nobleman from the sixteenth century. Despite the
presence of saints, Medium Joel Born, a Catholic, makes it
clear that the CASA is not a church but rather
a spiritual hospital. My mission has nothing to do with religion,
he says, So have the has have these guys ever

(01:04:26):
been like sued by the estates of these This feels
a little bit like Mormons, like nope, baptizing people in
in uh like postmortem. Most of the poor people who
come to John of God are too poor to sue
if they're serious diseases don't get cured. And most of
the rich people aren't actually coming there for serious diseases.
They're coming there for things like like susan as. We're like,

(01:04:48):
they're sad. You know, that's a lot of patients. Sorry
I meant, I meant the estates of these spirits of
the um Man. Yeah, that that would be fun to
try to sue someone for that. I don't know that
there's any legal precedent. I think it's really funny that
you're like talking about like, Okay, well we've got this
infectious disease doctor, but actually he's calling it a second

(01:05:11):
opinion from the sixteenth century noble. Yeah, exactly. It's like, hey,
my grandpa, you know, admittedly, my my Nazi grandpa probably
wouldn't have supported this, I guess is not the best
court case, but yeah, you know, yeah boy um. Susan

(01:05:32):
goes on to write quote at the cosas skeptics or
is welcome as believers. I had already noticed that skeptics
didn't tend to stay that way. Many her rumping empirical
scientists had become impassioned John have got advocates after visiting
and witnessing him in action. She doesn't go on to
quote any of these scientists um or or give any
evidence of this. She just like says it um because
this is again a perfect piece of journalism. At one point,

(01:05:54):
Susan attends a healing and says that John of God
called for doctors in the audience to come forward. In
her recitation events, these learned men were all bowled over
by John's inexplicable healing abilities. As far as I can tell,
Susan took no action to determine if any of these
men were actual doctors. A real journalist, Michael Usher did
report critically on John of Gotten two thousand and fourteen
for sixty minutes, and I wanted to compare how she

(01:06:16):
and Michael both wrote about the medium's ice scraping surgery.
Quote from my vantage point only ten and this is
Susan from my vantage point only ten feet away. The
change in his body and demeanor was easily visible. Now
his eyes were more intense, and they flashed noticeably darker.
His gait became stiffer, his movements more deliberate. He turned
to the three women standing against the wall, took the

(01:06:36):
one closest to him by the hand, and gently sat
her in a wheelchair. Her eyes fluttered wide as she meditated.
Reaching to the tray, he selected a short knife with
a wooden handle, a cheap looking type that you might
used to pair and apple, and he held it up
to the room, making sure that everyone saw it sharp blade.
He tipped her head backward, running his hand across her face,
and he opened her left eye, holding the eyelid wide.
Then he began to skate scrape the knife across her eyeball,

(01:06:58):
back and forth with visible pressure. Unbelievably, the woman said
absolutely still, without flinching or recoiling. I had a hard
time watching this, believing as I do, that the words
knife and eyeball should never appear in the same sentence.
After what seemed like an eternity devoid of trauma. He
put down the knife. The orderly took the wheelchair and
steered it into the infirmary as she had the entire time,
the woman appeared to be napping. How on earth could
a knife cross your eyeball and not hurt? Later I

(01:07:20):
would interview another recipient of this treatment, Conny Price sixty
two from Jackson, Michigan. There was no pain whatsoever, she
said of the five minutes scraping, I could feel the
energy coming through him. I remember the heat pouring through
that man's body. Price found the treatment beneficial. I can
see a lot better now. So you'll notice the only
evidence of efficacy of healing is they didn't look to
be in pain when this guy was rubbing a knife

(01:07:41):
on their eye, and they said, one of them said, afterwards,
I can see better now. There's no Again, that's not evidence.
That's an anecdote, And that's not an anecdote based on
like actually testing her eyesight. Is that And also it's like,
aren't there isn't the whole thing that's like, there aren't
are there nerves on your eyeball? Because that's how they do.
Like ye, it's actually really easy to write. It's the

(01:08:04):
same thing with like shot. It's actually very easy to
rub a knife and even cut a little bit on
an eyeball without somebody being in a horrible pain. And
you know, even when you actually are cutting into people's chest, like,
it's easy for people to not feel pain. Like again,
people who like there there are people who like do
cutting and stuff or who will like like I I

(01:08:24):
have friends who like will suspend themselves from the fucking
things in the roof of a building with like hooks
in their back and like it feels good to them,
like there's like a release of endorphins. Like there's pain too,
but like they they're not like screaming in agony the
whole time, even though you would think they would be. Um,
like there's yeah exactly. The fact that these people don't

(01:08:49):
report pain or anything isn't weird and is part of
like a long documented history of people experiencing temporary relief
from faith, heaving and stuff like that. There's nothing mysterious
about it. Um For decade, it's Pentecostal revivalist preachers have
done things like prey over people with injured legs and
then have them discard their crutches and dance around and
The explanation for how this works is the same as
the explanation for why if you throw your back out

(01:09:11):
you might find yourself forgetting the pain during a moment
of extreme danger or extreme excitement. Like, it's just sometimes
our brains override our experience of pain. It happens. It's
a thing that people do. Um, it's like those stories
of women lifting cars off their babies. So, uh yeah,
that's how Susan Casey uncritically reports on a healing session.

(01:09:31):
Here's how a real journalist, Michael Usher, reports on a
pretty much identical healing session. John of God is not
a surgeon. He is not a trained doctor. Yet he
is presented with a tray of medical instruments, scalpels, and
all sorts of scissors. He takes a scalpel in scrapes eyes.
He sticks knives and scalpels of some story sort down
the back of people's throats, and he claims he is
getting to tumors. He claims he's getting to the root
of people's illnesses. He claims he is getting to what

(01:09:53):
makes people iller sick. None of it has done with
an anesthetic, and you don't even know if what he's
using as sterile. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that feels about right.
A large part of why John of God's magic seems
to work is the fact that he performs it all
in public, among and in front of a large and
enthusiastic crowd of true believers, many of whom also happened

(01:10:15):
to be desperately ill. John tells them that they can
all help fuel his work and heal themselves by sitting
in the current and basically meditating for hours while he
does his thing. As Susan Casey writes, on any given day,
maybe four people form the current, spelunking so deeply into
their interior realms that they might well be a sleeper
and esthetized. While doing so. They were framed from opening
their eyes or crossing their arms or legs. These things,

(01:10:36):
they are told, cut off the flow of energy as
surely as would kinking a hose. So that way. Yeah,
I'm if I'm throwing a lot of shade on Susan
Casey for her bad article here, it's because her choice
to platform John of God with no critical thinking or
even an attempted examination, brought his line of bullshit to

(01:10:58):
the eyes and ears of millions of vulnerable be Oprah
Winfrey had her on her show in two thousand ten UM,
and one of the millions of women who watched that
episode was a Dutch choreographer named Zahira Lenik Line Key
mouse Um. She suffered from sexual trauma, and Winfrey's episode
Do You Believe In Miracles convinced her that medium John
could heal her. She waited in line twice to receive

(01:11:19):
his healing after traveling to Brazil. On her first visit,
he prescribed to some of his HERB pills. When those
didn't do the trick, she went back and he offered
her a spiritual cleansing and a rare private session. From
the Washington Post quote, She waited until everyone in line
had their turns until finally she was alone and John
of God invited her into his office and then into
his bathroom. That's where Mos says he raped her, all

(01:11:40):
while leading her to believe it was part of her healing. Now,
Mos was one of hundreds and perhaps thousands of rape
victims of John of God. And I want to end
on this note to to get to the the point of,
like what's really happened here, which is that an American
industry based on uncritically looking at spiritual healer's funneled victims

(01:12:00):
into this guy's hands and allowed him to achieve a
level of influence and and basically like built a spider
web for this fucking spider of a man. Um. So
we're gonna continue the story of John of God in
part two, but right now we're going to continue the
story of uh Andrew T of God's uh plug doubles.

(01:12:24):
Oh ship, Uh you know, just go to the yours
this racist podcast. Um, I meant andrew T. Last name
is spelled t I everywhere. Uh yeah, that's it. That
is it. Well, I'm Robert Evans. You can find me
on the internet. Find the Bastards dot com. You can
find me on Twitter at I right, okay, uh and

(01:12:47):
if you want, I will just sort of rub a
machette all over your eyes. It's gonna cost you, I
don't know. Let's say I don't take any money, but
we do ask for three thousand dollar donations to our
our our medical center. So give me three thousand bucks
and I'll fucking I'll rub a machete on whatever part
of your body you want. That is a guarantee, absolute guarantee. Um,

(01:13:12):
and I also have a podcast called The Women's War.
It's upbeat. It tells you about how to how to
make things that don't suck out of your society when
it sucks, So maybe listen to that too. And um,
I don't know, go in Christ and cut up people's eyes.
Mm hmm yep, that's the podcast. Yeah, it is part

(01:13:36):
part one of the podcasts.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Part One: John of God: Oprah's Favorite Ghost-Channeling Rapist Surgeon