72: John of Fraud (w/Lisa Braun Dubbels and Mirna Wabi-Sabi)
Whatever one’s conception of “God” is, “John of God” should now be a nauseating name. For decades, João Teixeira de Faria pretended to heal an endless stream of pilgrims to his center in rural central Brazil through the Spiritist practice of “psychic surgery.” In reality, the miracle healing claims worked to cover up an obvious truth. João was sexually assaulting and raping women, in public and in private, likely every day of his “working” life. As he did so, he amassed a vast fortune in affiliate businesses, farming operations, real estate, referral rackets, and sales of crystals and fake remedies.In this episode we won’t retell this history, now poignantly captured by a new Brazilian-made documentary on Netflix. Instead, we’ll look at how lazy and motivated journalism shook hands with the entrepreneurial New Age to validate and accelerate the absurd claims of a monster. In addition to original reporting on how João made his mark in the U.S., Matthew is joined by former New Age publicist Lisa Braun Dubbels and Brazilian journalist Mirna Wabi Sabi to discuss the globalization of magic and abuse. Trigger warnings for this episode: rape, sexual assault, fraud, spiritual abuse.Show NotesBiles, Maroney, Raisman and Nichols opening statements before CongressChico Xavier | ObituaryIs ‘John of God’ a Healer or a Charlatan?John of God — SkepdicJames Randi ABC comments debriefThe trouble with Dr. OzJohn of God 2006 Atlanta ProgramAbout Heather CummingsOprah March 13, 2010: “Do You Believe in Miracles?” (webarchive)Leap of Faith: Meet John of God — Susan Casey (webarchive)Part One: John of God: Oprah’s Favorite Ghost-Channeling Rapist Surgeon – Behind the BastardsFamous Brazilian spiritual healer accused of sexual abuse | 60 Minutes Australia
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Conspirituality 72, John of Fraud with Lisa Braun doubles and Mirna Wabi Sabi.
Whatever one's conception of God is, John of God should now be a nauseating name for God.
For decades, João Teixeira de Faria pretended to heal an endless stream of pilgrims to his center in rural central Brazil through the spiritist practice of psychic surgery.
In reality, the miracle healing claims worked to cover up an obvious truth.
Zhao was sexually assaulting and raping women, in public and in private, likely every day of his working life.
As he did so, he amassed a vast fortune in affiliate businesses, farming operations, real estate, referral rackets, and sales of crystals and fake remedies.
In this episode, we won't retell this history, now poignantly captured by a new Brazilian-made documentary on Netflix.
Instead, we'll look at how lazy and motivated journalism shook hands with the entrepreneurial new age to validate and accelerate the absurd claims of a monster.
In addition to original reporting on how Zhao made his mark in the U.S., Matthew is joined by former New Age publicist Lisa Braun Dobles and Brazilian journalist Mirna Wabisabi to discuss the globalization of magic and abuse.
trigger warnings for this episode: rape, sexual assault, fraud, and spiritual abuse.
Yes, so Julian and Derek, are you guys familiar at all with John of God?
Did you catch any of the Netflix documentary?
I have not.
I only know him on the periphery, to be honest.
One thing I've learned in this conspirituality endeavor is there are so many of these figures it's hard to keep track of.
So I am learning as we go along producing this episode.
Yeah, I'd heard of him over the years as that faith healer guy in Brazil that credulous people who were desperately ill went to see in hopes of a miracle cure.
And I'll say in preparation for this episode, I've watched some of the Netflix documentary, the parts that I could get through.
It's disturbing.
And many YouTube videos as I tried to make sense of his bizarre psychic surgeries.
Well, it's a story that's had a ton of coverage, including this excellent documentary that we'll refer to.
But a lot of that coverage has been decades too late, as we'll see.
And we're going to link to a lot of reports and a lot of details in the show notes.
A brief overview will suffice.
So, John of God is a now-imprisoned Brazilian spiritist medium, once known for performing explicit and bloody psychic surgeries, reportedly while under the influence of one of 30 odd ghosts and saints.
The first being to take possession of him was said to be King Solomon, who possessed him when he was only a teenager.
Now, whatever happened between Jon and the Spirit Realm is not clear, but the stories about him and the miracle claims made by those who flocked to him, and also those who promoted him and profited from this parade, they work to cover up a more obvious truth, which was that Ja was sexually assaulting women in public, in private, likely every day of his working life.
And as he did so, he amassed this huge fortune.
And we know all of this through the brave testimony of the women who survived him, because the Brazilian courts have found their testimonies to have merit.
And so he is currently at the front end of a prison sentence that is going to keep compounding until he dies as more criminal charges are brought and I'm sure more convictions will follow.
And he's serving currently his sentence under house arrest reportedly due to the dangers of COVID in prison and to his age.
He is 79.
What really struck me, and again I focused a lot on the claims of psychic surgery, in watching that first episode on Netflix, is just how much more hammed up his classic spirit possession, like channeling performance was when he was younger.
It seems like As he progressed further and further into his career, he didn't have to convince people of his claims anymore.
But in those earlier performances, we really see, I think, the total sociopathy of someone who's learned to trick others by faking trans states, welling up with tears because he's so overcome with the grace of the spirits that are possessing him, apparently, and then the seeming disoriented surprise when he comes back.
And over time, there's less and less of any sort of performance like that.
Yeah, I caught that too, and it really speaks to charisma as a kind of feedback loop that takes on its own credibility momentum.
And I think it shows that with enough social contagion, over enough time, and also probably with enough money involved, the dude at the center of something like this can start just phoning it in.
Now, at the end of the Netflix series, so little spoiler alert for people, the filmmakers actually gain access to him for a brief interview in what looks to be his comfortable middle-class home in Annapolis in Goyas.
Now, he's out of the prison clothes we saw him in previously.
His hair is combed, he looks reasonably well-fed, and we see new leather sandals under his flashing ankle bracelet monitor.
And he sits in this really clean, lazy-boy-type leather recliner watching TV and fiddling with a large emerald ring.
And the interviewer asks what he has to say about his multiple convictions, and he replies slowly, as if entranced.
He says, everyone who preached the word of God was nailed to the cross.
Even his son was nailed to the cross.
If he went, why wouldn't I?
What I told the authorities is what happened, not what people are saying.
I mean, this is as grotesque as it gets for me, because what he's really saying is that having been prosecuted and imprisoned for awful crimes is actually evidence of his divinity.
If it was good enough for Jesus, well then surely I too must suffer the same martyrdom as if he's being nailed to the cross, you know, because he's been a faithful servant of God.
Yeah, it's kind of extraordinary.
It actually made me wonder whether Christianity is uniquely positioned to offer this kind of revolving door set of rationalizations for crooks that way, you know?
It's like, well, the best person in the world was prosecuted in the same way that I am and therefore I must be like him.
Yeah, so if viewers, you know, hadn't come to the conclusion before this point that this is not someone who is capable of remorse, I think Zhao's utter shamelessness in this moment probably closed that book.
And I think we can armchair about his mental health.
I mean, he seems to meet the markers for sociopathy, as you suggested, Julian, and traumatized narcissism.
That's Dan Shaw's term for the internal state of a leader who, if he stops controlling the lives of others, he feels like he's going to die.
But Beyond whatever his pathology is, and the well-established reporting on his crimes, I really want to focus on something different, which is the downstream process that follows a celebrity conviction, and that asks the question, you know, how did this happen?
And I think we have, especially in the States, an active and open parallel currently in the Larry Nassar case.
It parallels Joao de Deus in function, if not in the form of spiritism and spiritual tourism, because Nassar also abused women who came to him for healing, and the community portrayed that healing as miraculous, even though it was never really substantiated.
And he abused these people in broad daylight.
And the facts of Nassar's crimes are now also a closed book.
But in the downstream from his therapy room, there are these other areas for discovery.
And first we have the lawsuits that have unfolded over years against Michigan State University and USA Olympics, both employers of Nassar, because they knowingly covered up what he was up to.
Just two weeks ago, Simone Biles, Michaela Moroney, Maggie Nichols, and Ali Raisman appeared before a congressional committee to excoriate the negligence of the university and the USAO, but also the FBI, which dragged its heels on investigating their abuser when they had a ton to go on.
And that delay allowed him to, of course, continue while abandoning his survivors to years of additional neglect.
But the other downstream aspect, I don't know if it's downstream, it might be upstream, I think, you know, I want to really look at the whole river here, is what kind of culture creates an economy of abuse?
Like, how did Larry Nassar sell himself to a gymnastics world that sold itself to the parents of its participants as a pathway to all-American wholesomeness?
And I think we can flip these questions onto John of God, and we can start to ask, how did this obvious criminal become the darling of the international New Age scene?
How many people had to suppress whatever questions they had about his miraculous and pseudoscientific claims in order to sit in the spiritual current at his center in Abhijanya?
Or, when he started traveling internationally, how many people with how much power and how much money either had to be duped by this guy or turn their heads when they realized he was a crook and a rapist?
So, we'll work through the history a little bit with a special focus on what made him so famous, so captivating, this thing called psychic surgery, and Julian's prepared some data on it.
This was the process of publicly and ritually cutting into the bodies of pilgrims with unsterilized implements and seeming to extract from the wounds tumors or Whatever.
So before we get there, the basics of his background, at least up until 2005, we should do a short note on them.
And, you know, a lot of the sources for his biographical information come from either him or his devotees, so there's going to be a lot of bullshit in this, but this is what we have.
You know, we have a rags-to-riches story of a quote-unquote simple farmer who became a pool shark, but then also a tailor, as you do, but also a tailor for the military.
His father was a tailor, I think.
He fell in with a group of spiritists while a teenager, I think 16 years old, and then was taught the craft of mediumship.
and began performing psychic surgeries as, you know, or sort of in the stream of this whole genre that exists in Brazil.
And it appears that he had a traveling healing show for many years until he claims, again, let's be clear that we can't really believe anything he says, He claims that his spiritist mentor, a guy named Chico Javier, told him to set up shop in Abidjania.
Now, Javier lived from 1910 to 2002 and he was Brazil's most famous spiritist.
He published 496 books many of them written as though taking dictation from the dead.
So he was kind of like this Pope of spiritism.
And if there was a Pope that could appoint John of God as Cardinal, it was Javier.
So I can imagine 496 podcast episodes, not books though.
I also just want to say that hypergraphia is a presentation of people with, of some people with temporal lobe epilepsy, which we've discussed in a fair amount of detail on this podcast, especially you, Julianne.
Yeah, it's pretty suggestive.
Pretty suggestive when you combine being spirit-possessed, going into those trance states, and then writing and writing and writing.
Right.
Literally, you can't stop writing, right?
Yeah.
Take the pen out of his hand.
Okay, so by the early 2000s, international spiritual tourism to Abidjania is booming and Joao de Deus is attracting a lot of media attention.
This brings us to 2005.
ABC News runs a piece on John of God that tracks five devotees who travel to him for quote-unquote healing And the piece is skeptical.
It's called, actually, Is John of God a Healer or a Charlatan?
And the report is mixed.
Some of the devotees improve, some get sicker.
There's no real hard evidence to go on as to whether or not John of God is Doing what he's saying he's doing.
But where ABC really screws up is in having the quack and quack certifier Dr. Oz on as their medical expert, who expresses a lot of sort of, gee willikers, how can this be happening?
It's amazing, I can't believe what I'm seeing.
But ABC also interviews the skeptic James Randi for the show.
Randy reviewed videotape of John of God and then spent his time in his interview explaining how every surgery followed the basic techniques of street magic and sleight of hand.
However, his appearance was whittled down to 19 seconds and we've got an audio clip of him complaining about that in the notes.
Julian, I think you know a lot about James Randy and how he investigated the theater of the paranormal.
So what can you tell us about him?
Yeah, James Randi was a fantastic guy.
He's a Canadian, and like most Canadians, just fantastic.
He became fascinated.
He was a magician, but then as a magician, as happens with some people, Darren Brown is another great one who's active today from England.
He became fascinated with paranormal claims.
He rose to prominence in the 1970s via several TV appearances.
He became famous for exposing Peter Popoff, who was one of those big tent, you know, faith healer kind of revival meeting guys.
With the radio thing, right?
With the earpiece in.
And basically, all the people would show up, they would fill out their prayer cards of the things that was going on with them, they would hand them in, and then his wife from the back would read them out to him and say, you know, second row, 45-year-old lady, she has lung cancer, her name is Betsy.
And he'd say, the spirit is coming through me saying, Betsy, Betsy, who has lung cancer?
You know, you can't breathe.
And so, you know, Randy was famous for, for exposing people like this.
And Peter Palfov was one of them.
He also very famously was on Johnny Carson on the same night as Uri Geller.
So the TV talk show hosts started to learn that this was some pretty good material for their shows.
And so Uri Geller had a bunch of props that he would use to do his magic tricks.
Randy showed up and said, uh, let's replace those with exact replicas that we know don't have any trickery about them.
He said that he was a mentalist.
He could bend spoons with his mind, right?
Exactly.
So yeah, Uri Geller, this is the thing is that Randy said there, there are people doing magic and they'll tell you it's a trick, but they won't tell you how.
And then there are people claiming they have real magical powers.
And so of course Geller sits there once his props have been, you know, switched out with the real thing and just says, you know, the energy is not good tonight.
I don't think I'm going to be able to perform while Johnny Carson classically just smokes and smirks at him the whole time.
So anyway, Randy would go on these TV shows.
He would have a check in his pocket.
It escalated from $10,000 to $30,000 where he would say, I know how you did the trick you just did.
If you can do it without the trickery that I've exposed, I'll give you the money.
Of course, no one ever took the money.
Eventually, he starts the James Randi Foundation, which has the Million Dollar Challenge, offering a grand prize to anyone who can show under agreed upon laboratory conditions that they have paranormal abilities.
No dime has ever been spent by James Randi on an authentic claim.
Right.
So quite a story.
Yeah.
So I want to add here, too, in a transition is that...
With someone like John of God, there's a kind of theater of the paranormal that I feel like I've gleaned from studying a lot of skeptic debunking here.
And seekers are really drawn into these three key ingredients.
So the first one is the credulity of the consumer, right?
The person entering that arena is really seeking help.
They're primed by their belief, they're anticipating having an emotionally impactful experience once they cross the threshold into that theater of the paranormal.
They've also spent a lot of money, there's a sunken cost.
They are very motivated to believe, right?
Absolutely, absolutely.
And then, typically, whatever the modality is, there's some kind of transcendent authority as the second element.
So, sort of hovering behind the practitioner is some universal source of energy, or God, or an ancient and complex understanding of the ethereal body, some spirit that they're going to channel along those lines.
And that's framed as part of what happens within this particular space.
The Anointed One will give you access to some mysterious experience and phenomenon.
And then third is the confidence game.
Once the experience is underway, confidence is established and amplified by the practitioner appearing to have access to knowledge in ways that stands as evidence for the special powers that are being claimed.
Most run-of-the-mill practitioners will then use a combination of cold reading or information that they've sort of secretly gathered and the internet makes this even more easy now to do if you know how to dig around.
For someone like John of God, as we mentioned before, and then Sai Baba comes to mind as well, this stops being necessary because they've transformed into such a mythic figure that just entering the room has a powerful impact on the people who are there to be in his presence.
Just looking intently at people, enacting certain ritualized gestures and flourishes is enough to make the whole room swoon. - You know, it's like what we were saying about him eventually phoning it in I wonder if there's a comparable profession where you actually, as you become more popular, as you start making more money, you have to do less and less work.
You can become less and less competent.
Like, nothing's really ringing a bell.
I mean, most people try to outdo themselves as they go on, but it seems that the skills actually have declined in these cases.
It's weird.
Yeah, yeah, as the convincing becomes less necessary, right?
Right.
So some background here I think is helpful in that this faith healing performance art that gets labeled psychic surgery is mostly prevalent in Brazil and the Philippines for whatever reason.
The version from the Philippines is that predictable sleight of hand act usually performed on the belly of someone, right?
And it involves chicken blood and chicken parts and a lot of sleight of hand where the person pretends to insert their hands, their fingers into the person's belly and remove diseased tissue.
And then as if nothing happened, they wiped the blood away and there's no incision.
There's no hole where they just stuck their hand.
What people do in Brazil is a little different.
The Brazilian psychic surgeons do on occasion actually cut people and make them bleed as part of the performance.
And I'm not sure exactly how it all works.
Surely there's other sleight of hand involved as well.
They always claim that they're doing the cutting without anesthetic or sterilization, which seems impossible.
And actually, Randy in that audio clip points out that we can't actually be sure of that, that in some of the more extreme cases, the person involved could actually be a stooge who's received an anesthetic, a local anesthetic offstage, and then they're brought into the healing arena, and then John of God can poke around in his arm that's been frozen, actually.
Yeah, it seems highly likely.
The performative way in which the whole thing goes down.
I mean, he's in a room that's packed with other patients and other observers.
The cameras are flashing constantly.
He comes in through a door.
They bring in the person who's about to have the extreme procedure.
They kind of shove them up against the wall.
And then there are assistants, often very attractive women in the videos I saw who are like handing him things.
And so there's ample opportunity for tricks and for the person having been treated ahead of time and prepared for the procedure.
His most common technique he doesn't cut into a lot of people.
The thing he does the most is drive a pair of surgical tweezers with moistened cotton at the top, deep up a person's nose.
And this person is usually shoved up against the wall, their head is back and they're grimacing in pain and fear.
It's a very intense moment.
And then he twists the tweezers multiple times before pulling it out.
And of course, when he pulls it out, that moistened piece of cotton that he attached in full view of everyone now looks bloody or black or whatever.
And he says, this is the source of your breast cancer or your injury or whatever it is.
Yeah, it's incredible.
His other less frequent performances, as I said, we probably would imagine there's some sort of setup involving anesthetic and sleight of hand so that he can remove what appear to be tumors.
Well, it's really good to have a rundown of the theatrical elements.
I want to, like, as a journalistic note here, I want to just say that we won't be looking to any of the available footage of John of God cutting into people or, you know, skewering them with forceps because, like, as far as I'm concerned, and I think you started to get into this a little bit, these are actually depictions of people being physically assaulted.
It's not what the filmmakers thought they were filming, of course, but I think that's what they actually are in hindsight.
Because, you know, there's this power dynamic at play that you start to allude to.
The basic structure is that You know, John of God is in control, and also that he's the one that is going to always be filled up with authority, with divinity, with inspiration and healing power, and that the patient is always surrendering to be Put through a process of purification to be pierced or scraped and they're always going to have something taken out of them.
So he's full of God.
They are full of disease.
That's sort of the ironclad rule that I mean, it's so ironclad that when he himself in 2015, he develops this aggressive stomach cancer that you know, he ends up having an a six centimeter tumor extracted from from his abdomen.
And, of course, he goes to Sao Paulo and he has proper surgery in a proper hospital.
Oh, they didn't pull it out through his nose?
No, they did not.
And he hides out for five months and he doesn't tell anybody and he does say that, oh, well, I've been hospitalized for a stomach hernia.
Oh.
It's like he can't, there's, he can't, he does not get medium care, right?
Like, because it's not something bad that's inside him.
It's actually cancer, right?
Yeah.
And so he's going to get proper care.
Yeah, and the thing that's wild about that is that this enterprise went on for decades and part of it was that there was a separate room where a group of other mediums would sit sort of building energy up to help heal people.
You would think if he had any sincere belief in any of this stuff, there would be an infrastructure there to help heal the medium.
Yeah, I wonder about that.
I mean, one other thing that we should say about the separation of rooms is that there's an active sort of procedure room, there is a mass room for group meditation where people are quote-unquote sitting in the current, and then there are chosen sort of, I guess, adjacent mediums that are preparing to help people in one way or another.
But, uh, everybody except John is encouraged to have their eyes closed the entire time.
Which also, I think, aids in whatever sleight of hand and, you know, distraction and mystification is going on.
I want to return to your description of the violence, which I think is very apt.
And it's very disturbing, I think, not just to...I mean, when I first saw these images, I responded first to the blood and to the incisions, but not necessarily to the fact that the agency of the person was being violated.
Like, there was something about Looking at the process as an outsider with a somewhat critical lens that just bought off on the fact that, oh, they had just chosen to be there and this is what they were going through and it's not something that I can understand.
And it reminds me of this research that I did into Patabi Joyce for the book that I published in 2019.
Joyce is the founder of Ashtanga Yoga.
Like John of God, he likely assaulted women every working day of his life under the guise of healing or therapy.
Also in plain sight, he would give these adjustments that were like totally non-consensual, not to mention dangerous, resulting in untold numbers of injuries.
And all of this was normalized by the cult dynamics of the group as being for the person's benefit.
So, he was realigning people, he was purifying them, he was teaching them the deep discipline of yoga.
And we see that in John of God's key, we'll see this later, that in his key US appearances, his main host, the Omega Institute, had participants sign a waiver acknowledging that psychic surgery was not a substitute for medical care.
and you know it's a well-meaning attempt at creating informed consent but what we have at La Casa and in Mysore with Batabi Joyce is the exact opposite of informed consent because participants can't possibly know what they're in for and that's why the group interpretation that it's actually miraculous has to be so pervasive it has to be so tight and I think one upshot of this is that John of God's assaults on countless people
In broad daylight, bizarrely, make him even less vulnerable to accusations of abuse.
As in, if I'm doing this in public, you know, and you've accepted it, not only have you accepted it, but you've converted it in your brains to benefit, then what can't I do?
So, you know, if in private he does something similar, you know, the interpretive framework is already set.
Alright, so Randy is shortchanged in the ABC report back to 2005, but I think what's most important for this episode about that 2005 report is the following passage.
Yet, there are also rumors that John of God has a much darker side.
Juliana Almeida-Franca, a district attorney who has investigated John of God, says he sent her death threats, delivered by a relative.
Zhao denies this.
Zhao has also been accused of taking advantage of a woman who came to be healed.
There's a lot of jealousy.
People talk.
What dictates is the conscience toward God, he answered.
He insisted his healings are legitimate.
You can fool the people for one or two years, but you cannot fool people for 45 years, he said.
Au contraire!
I mean, it's an amazing passage where You know, we also, like, what does it take for ABC to be able to say so much in one sentence and yet so little?
Like, I wish I was at the editorial meeting for that and how that got sorted out.
But there, it's just gonna hang there in space.
Zhao has also been accused of taking advantage of a woman who came to be healed.
So in 2006, He gets invited to do an Abhijanya-like program in Atlanta.
So it's April 2-4.
One day is $130.
Three days, $360.
There's about a thousand people in attendance.
and $30, three days, $360.
There's about a thousand people in attendance.
That is a gross of around $400,000 for the three days.
And we'll see that this leads to the first visit to the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York in 2007.
And And Derek, you've done a little backgrounder on the Omega Institute, so what can you tell us?
Yes, it's in a beautiful area of New York that I spent a fair amount of time in, in my dozen years living in New York City.
But the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies was founded in 1977 by Elizabeth Lesser and Stefan Rechafin.
Stefan is someone who I shared a number of meetings and meals with back in the early aughts and I really enjoyed him.
It was shortly before he was going to Open a center in Costa Rica as he was transitioning out of Omega.
But the property now sits on a 190 acre plot of land in Rhinebeck, as Matthew mentioned, on a pond a few miles from the Hudson River.
And this is about two hours north of New York City.
But the Omega Institute was originally housed in retreats in upstate New York and Vermont.
Upstate New York is anything north of New York City, if you don't know that.
So it's really a very, very big area.
So Elizabeth and Stéphane were inspired by the famous Sufi mystic, Vilayat Inyat Khan, who had started his own retreat center of sorts called the Abode of the Message in New Lebanon, New York.
And he helped them co-found the original Omega Institute.
And they chose the name Omega to honor the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
Now, interestingly, both Elizabeth and Stéphane were living in a shaker village when they founded Omega.
So that name comes from the Shaking Quakers, which is a millenarian, non-Trinitarian, restorationist Christian sect.
Ah yes, of course, of course.
As one does, dating back to the mid-18th century.
So the Shakers believed in Christ's second coming, and they lived a very simple Amish lifestyle.
They also modeled their villages after equality of the sexes, and their members were celibate.
So there's a lot going on with the Shakers.
Their headquarters were in the same town as Kahn's abode.
So there was a community happening there at this time, post-Woodstock, not too far south from Woodstock.
We can imagine the two being the product of the late 60s mashing of Eastern philosophy and Western mysticism, and they were seeking a home to provide a wide variety of spiritual modalities.
Their founding message was, quote, to provide hope and healing for individuals and society through innovative educational experiences that awaken the best in the human spirit, end quote.
So, most listeners are probably aware of the Esalen Institute in Big Sur or Kripalu in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
Omega has housed numerous spiritual figures, many who have appeared at Big Sur and Kripalu.
So, among the guest list that have been presenters is Ram Dass, Alan Gittsberg, Thich Nhat Hanh, Eckhart Tolle.
You know, a few figures you've heard on this podcast.
You've got Pema Chodron, Ajay Shanti, you've got Deepak Chopra, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and of course, the subject of this episode, John of God.
Honestly, there have been thousands of presenters at Omega, and their website, they claim to house 23,000 people every year and reach 2 million in their online efforts and retreats.
And I had visited outposts in New York City.
They were always doing events, so I do know their work fondly.
I think the first one was a kirtan I attended with Krishnadas probably like 20 years ago now.
The Center has remained relatively scandal-free in its long history.
Besides the issues that we're getting to with John of God, there was an alleged sexual harassment case in 2015 when a camp cook demanded a tantric genital massage from a co-worker.
That was a small, and those were two workers.
You didn't have any real top-level scandals happening at this place.
As I said, it's From my awareness, it's pretty respected.
What you think of the subject matter is another, you know, story.
But Omega has been an important retreat center for many people in that area for many decades now.
So just looking ahead, you can see this mashing where, you know, you can meditate with Rolf Gates this fall, you can learn mindfulness with Jon Kabat-Zinn, who very regularly travels south to present there.
You can practice yoga with Colleen Seidman and Rodney Yee, also regular visitors of the Hamptons slash Omega circuit there.
Angel Keota Williams is doing her Radical Dharma camp.
But of special interest to Conspirituality listeners, I know Matthew has signed up to learn the work from Byron Katie.
Yeah, I'll be there.
Finally, finally!
Yeah, my issues will be clear.
I'll be much easier to work with.
You can ask me the four questions in Slack.
You know, I'm glad that you talked a little bit about the talent that circles through Omega Institute, because what stood out most to me in my many visits, and I love the place as well, it's beautiful, it's bucolic, you know, it's...
Got this sort of shabby chic but also very neat and tidy feeling to it is that it's incredibly eclectic.
I was there to work on a social justice and yoga project but you know there's always several groups and residents at the same time so while my group is brainstorming policy about creating yoga spaces like free from sexual assault.
Uh, there was another group that was practicing astral travel.
Uh, there was another group that was doing like an extended juice fast.
Like it really takes all types.
It's like, you know, global village type place.
And, you know, I would say though, that as I think about it, it, it feels like this mix of subjects and epistemologies sort of attitudes towards the world and knowledge is kind of a, it's a, it's a key, I don't know, part of the story of how John of I don't know, part of the story of how John of God ends up being validated in this Um, it,
It seems that the counterculture workshop and retreat industry in the global north throws a lot of different things together according to market demand.
And I think this tends to create a mutual validation network for things that just don't go together.
You know, the last time I was there, this was October of 2018, so it was just a couple of months before the news dropped on John of God.
I took this video with my camera of the presenter's lunchroom, which I wasn't a presenter, but we had access to it for our working group.
And on the walls, there are portraits of past presenters.
And there's John of God's mug right there beside a portrait of Gloria Steinem, Toni Morrison, Pema Chodron, Maya Angelou, Al Gore, Woody Guthrie.
And so, you know, I imagine, as I'm researching this episode, the earnest and impressionable person in their 20s or so.
But who in 2007 or 2014 or 2017 would have heard of John of God coming to Omega Institute and then, you know, did a little bit of Googling to figure out what Omega was all about and then maybe bought their ticket In part because they were fans of Maya Angelou.
I mean the thing that I'm reflecting on now as I hear you talking as well is that this is not that different from the gurus who would be hosted at these different retreat centers in previous times, but it strikes me just freshly as how Just how grotesque all of this is when the audience that is being drawn in are people who have really bad illnesses.
The promise, like what you're paying for is to come and see this world-renowned healer because it may be the last chance you have to recover from cancer and there's nothing there.
It's just so, it's hard for me to make sense of how an organization like Omega would go, yeah, that seems like a great idea.
Well, that's why I wanted to talk to Skip Bakas, who's the current CEO, and he was kind enough to give me a good amount of time for an interview.
And the first thing that I'll note is that I felt that it was really productive.
And to your description of the Omega Institute fall schedule, Derek, I actually asked him about this blending of social justice and ecological awareness and New Age content, and he gave a really interesting answer that we'll hear a little later.
But about John of God, Bacchus said that, I asked, you know, so how did he end up coming to Omega in 2007?
And Skip said that he was first recommended by a staffer, a friend of Omega Institute who had been to the Atlanta event the previous year.
And Skip was sufficiently impressed that he booked a trip for Abhijanya soon after.
And while he was there, he met Heather Cummings, Whose hagiography of John of God would be published within that same year.
It looks like Cummings, who I think is, her family is English, but she was born and raised in Brazil, actually.
She did more to promote John of God in English as his translator and booking agent than any other person.
She didn't respond to my Facebook message request for an interview.
I sent an email as well.
Also, there's an interesting note about Heather Cummings that her website at this point advertises her connection to the beings of light that she first met at La Casa, but John of God's name is nowhere to be found on her website.
There's no mention of her book about him.
She was his right-hand rep for almost two decades.
So, Skip described visiting Abidjanja and being very taken by what a different place it was and how rural it was, how it felt like another time and place.
He said that it was right on the edge of the rainforest, that people were still riding horses into town and tying them up at bars and grocery stores.
And he was a lifelong meditator as well and so, you know, because at La Casa one of the main things that you do during the event days is you sit and meditate with closed eyes while the procedures are going on, that suited him very well.
And he also said that he was a cancer patient and so there was something very charged about this experience and personally meaningful.
But he stayed with Heather Cummings, the booking agent, while he was there, and he described getting into the logistical questions with her about a potential visit to Rhinebeck early on, like how many visitors could Omega accommodate and so on.
And I asked if he felt like he was being pitched in some sort of business sense, and he said no, not really, because John at that point was traveling to Australia, to Europe, he didn't need more hosts.
So for him, it was much more about the experience.
He said that he was extremely impressed by the rituals.
He was within two feet of one of the surgeries at one point and there was no way that he could explain what was going on.
So he said at that time he was moderately aware of the spiritism context in Brazil.
He said, however, that it wasn't really about the history, that he was really looking to see whether or not this event would be right for Omega.
This was very much specifically to what is it that this person is doing?
Is it potentially of value from a healing perspective?
Because that's where it had to fit into Omega's mission, that it had something that was connected to spirit and to wellness and healing.
And did it represent what looked like a value to try it out?
I'm talking surgeries where you actually cut into people.
John of God and his family.
John of God was traveling with one of his wives at the time and one of his children.
And that seemed to be unremarkable.
It was the healing performances that made their biggest impression on Skip.
I'm talking surgeries where he actually cut into people.
At one point, I stood within two feet of the surgery.
And I also had conversations with the person prior to surgery and after the surgery.
And there was no way to explain what actually happened right in front of your eyes.
And that was part of the mystery of it.
And he was sufficiently impressed, and he knew that Omega Institute could accommodate the event, and plans were set for a first trip to Rhinebeck in 2007.
So, did he really believe in what John of God was doing?
Like in a way, yes, but there's some subtlety to it.
I can tell you, I did not think that his surgeries were particularly linked to healing anyone of something.
Always for me, it was about what was it like for the people that were there?
What was the energy that was there?
And the fact that it was always communicated that he's not healing anyone, you're healing your system.
And that's a mantra that was just driven home time and time again.
And what I observed there, and then later the years at Omega, was the healing happened in the community of people that went.
The sitting in meditation, the believing that you could heal yourself, that you had a role in your own health and your healing.
And that's where the, if you were to say magic was that happened here at Omega, was the community of people that to this day are still, you know, wanting to sit in community around taking responsibility for their own wanting to sit in community around taking responsibility for their own And that's what happened in Brazil.
And that's what happened here was that the power of the strong community sitting with that healing.
with that intention, I think, was sort of the, from where people found the sense of healing and the sense of positive experience. - So by 2010, the mainstream floodgates have opened. the mainstream floodgates have opened.
Oprah was interested, and they produced the first of two episodes on John of God.
Now, in December of 2018, when the first of now hundreds of women came forward to accuse John of God of sexual assault, the Oprah Winfrey Network took these episodes offline, but The internet never forgets, of course, and the copy for the episode page reads, now remember this is in 2010.
Some believe John of God, a simple farmer with no medical degree and little education, is a medium who channels the spirits of more than 30 dead doctors and saints to bring physical and spiritual healing.
Working out of a place called the Casa, a spiritual center open to all faiths, he performs surgeries seemingly without anesthesia or sterilization.
These surgeries mostly take the form of incisions, eye scrapings, and nasal probes.
Many who have experienced these procedures claim they feel little to no pain, and reports of infections are hard to find.
However, the majority of the healings don't involve physical contact.
The Kasa is also famous for its invisible surgeries, where it's believed that the spirits are the ones doing the work.
Some have even reported finding incisions on their bodies after these invisible surgeries.
People around the world have credited John of God and the spirits that they believe work through him with miraculous healings.
Others have accused him of impropriety.
Despite his detractors, those whose lives he has touched say he is a simple man with a gift.
John of God charges no fees and takes no credit for what he does.
He says it is the power of God working through him.
Let's just underline that others have accused him of impropriety and they are detractors.
We can also underline John of God charges no fees and takes no credit for what he does.
We're going to link to a great pair of episodes put out by Robert Evans of Behind the Bastards who does a great job of covering the money stuff and how it's absolute rubbish to say that he charges no fees.
Um, but, moving on.
2005, we have ABC reporting that he's threatening a DA with death for investigating something.
I mean, we don't know what.
And then, here in, uh, oh, oh, and then, same report, 2005, Zhao has also been accused of taking advantage of a woman who came to be healed.
And then in 2010, we have the Oprah Network, even as they are boosting him, reporting that others have accused him of impropriety.
Now, in conjunction with that episode, Oprah's platform published this incredibly naive, sycophantic article by a journalist named Susan Casey.
It's called Leap of Faith, Meet John of God.
Now, in that Robert Evans review on Behind the Bastards, he picks this article apart, so we'll link to that.
But we can just say that Casey's piece achieves this peak expression of breathless New Age spiritual tourism and bypassing.
She does less than zero investigation of the claims made about John of God, but I think in part this is for a somewhat vulnerable reason.
She's trying to make sense on her journey of the death of her own father.
So the piece ends with this intense experience of John of God's apparent wisdom, his assurances that life is eternal.
And Casey describes meditating in the current, in the casa, in that room, and having a vision of being with her deceased father, suspended in golden light.
So it's beautiful writing, and so incredibly inappropriate.
And from a legitimate journalist with chops and awards, she's got two New York Times bestsellers, I reached out to her for comment through her agent.
Her agent confirmed that he would pass the message along, but she hasn't responded.
Okay, so here's an interesting detail.
At the bottom of that Oprah.com web episode page, that's now on WebArchive, that featured the episode, there are resources listed and a bullet point that says, John of God will be at the Omega Institute in September of 2011.
Now, in 2013, Oprah visits John of God herself in Abidjania, and she has a transformative time.
Now, we've lost this episode as well to the deletion, but we do have verbatim transcripts from a press release.
How do we best shift our energy?
Love.
Some people come, but they are not ready to accept the eventual disincarnation of the leaving the body.
We do not believe in death.
We believe in God.
You don't believe in death?
What happens when we die?
Eternal life.
Just drop the body.
And then where is heaven?
In all the hearts of those that respect God above all else, God is everywhere.
And how do you define God?
God is love.
Of course!
Of course.
Thank you, Derek, as Oprah Winfrey and Julian as John of God.
Now, the Oprah Winfrey Network has scrubbed these episodes and the only thing that doesn't make this a dirty delete is a brief statement given by Winfrey herself to the New York Times in December of 2018.
She says, quote, I went to Brazil in 2012 to tape an episode of Oprah's Next Chapter that explored the controversial healing methods of John of God.
The episode aired in 2013.
I empathize with the women now coming forward and I hope justice is served.
I think in a better world, Oprah would maybe order a forensic accounting of the revenues for those shows and then turn that money over to the Brazilian lawyers and support workers who are continuing to sort out claims and damages.
But that's another world.
Okay.
Fast forward to 2014.
John is slated to travel to Australia for an event.
60 Minutes, Australian broadcasting company, sends a team to put together a report that, for the first time, lays bare some of what is in the closet.
And the reporting is led here by Michael Usher, who is able to just shred John of God very calmly, talking about money, bringing up police reports, bringing up the allegations of sexual assault.
It's really riveting, so we'll play about three minutes and 40 seconds from that broadcast.
But Mr Fareer's business and personal affairs need serious scrutiny, not just scepticism.
In recent years, two deaths at John of God's compound warranted police investigations, but no charges were laid.
And in 2010, US detectives investigated allegations of sexual assault allegedly committed by him.
In this report from the Sedona Police Department, the victim states John Ferreira took her hand and placed it on his genitals.
She also says he tried to pull down her skirt.
Somebody is saying that John harassed sexually somebody while he was here in Sedona.
Later, a friend of Mr Faria's allegedly met with the victim asking her to drop the complaint.
This is an apparent recording of that conversation.
I really need to be able to say that you do not have anything against us.
I need you to put this in writing.
That there is nothing that you are saying against us.
Against Picasso and against John.
The case never made it to court.
Mr Ferreira returned to Brazil where he has nine children to three wives.
Let me ask you then, have you ever sexually assaulted any of your followers?
Could anyone interpret that for me?
His team refused to translate my question.
John of God, could we ask you a few more questions please?
No, no.
Just to properly understand exactly who you are.
Suddenly silent, he waited until he was around the corner away from the camera to insult our interpreter as she was translating my question.
Have you ever sexually assaulted any of your followers?
When she asked if he'd sexually assaulted anyone, he stared her down and said, your mother.
So he responded to my question, of which there are very serious allegations and police records, that he insulted you.
Yes.
And you're just translating the question for me?
Yes, I'm just translating.
That's a good mark of a man, isn't it?
Yes, it is.
Later, his minders were clearly not prepared to explain his actions then or in the past.
The simple truth of it is, John is coming to Australia, we're allowed to ask fair questions about who is this man coming to Australia, On the record, there are allegations of sexual assault.
But perhaps realising his ungodly comments were bad for business, he returned, demanding to see outtake.
I want to watch because I don't know what you have recorded there.
I want to watch to see what has been recorded.
He wants to see what you have recorded.
No.
Tell Jao what he said around the corner was thoroughly offensive.
You suggested sexual assault of her mother in a very cruel and quite ugly accusation against her.
You were being incredibly rude.
I want to watch what is recorded.
No, I will watch it.
No, I will watch it.
No, no, no.
Please don't.
It's this attitude John Ferrier will bring to Australia next month, where he plans to put on a show.
Do you believe John of God should be allowed to come to Australia?
Absolutely not.
I can't believe that the Australian Government would welcome into our country someone who pretends to provide medical treatments and medical cures in such a barbaric and deliberately manipulated way.
So fantastic reporting there.
Fantastic.
You might have heard that there was kind of a scrum there at the end when he's demanding to see the tape.
He actually reaches out and grabs the wrist of the translator and Usher actually has to step in and say, no, you're not going to do that.
You're not going to physically intimidate anybody.
And it's this really amazing moment where you see the world of the Kaza colliding with reality where, you know, obviously you're not going to physically grab the translator if you're living in the real world trying to get your way.
So circling back to Omega Institute, and this is important because that broadcast airs in 2014 and Omega Institute continues to host John of God until 2017. and this is important because that broadcast airs in 2014 team.
So, I talked to Skip about how he remembers the events at Omega Institute playing out.
And before we play some of those clips, I want to present how the Institute positioned itself as the host.
And we can get a clear sense of this from an event guide that I found from that same year, from 2014.
So, the event guide is still online, it's PDF, we'll link to it.
And it opens with these bits from the liability waiver that attendees had to sign.
So in part it reads, policees have not and do not promise, suggest, or imply the cure, improvement, or alteration of any disease, deformity, disability, or medical or psychological condition that I now have or may possibly have in the future.
I understand that my participation in the event is not a substitute for the advice and treatment of a licensed physician.
Okay, so there is some legal language there, but when the text gets past that point, it sounds like it's coming from another world.
So, Julian has some excerpts, and I just want to emphasize that all of this is on Omega Institute letterhead.
A visit to John of God is a powerful experience.
You may wish to meditate and set an intention for what you would like to receive from the experience.
You may find it helpful to write down your healing request and carry it with you in your pocket during the event to help you stay focused.
We cannot overemphasize the healing power of the meditation rooms.
A major part of the healing work of the entities happens in these rooms.
As we receive healing, our energies are also used for healing others.
The healings received in these rooms are sometimes dramatic and immediate.
Sometimes participants will have spontaneous spiritual interventions and will need to be taken to the infirmary.
Usually, however, the healings are subtle and sublime, unfolding over time.
It may be several months later that they are seen in retrospect.
Do not underestimate the power of this.
Please arrive on time for each session.
It takes time to build the energy field to allow the entities to incorporate in Medium Zhao's body.
Sometimes it will be an hour before sufficient energy has been generated.
In the meantime, the healing work of the unincorporated entities continues.
Meditation sessions are different each time.
Some might be blissful, and others challenging and downright painful, depending on what you're working through.
Passing before the entity is a very powerful process.
The energy transference that takes place can work on physical, emotional, and spiritual levels.
Some will feel nothing.
For others, it will be a powerful experience.
So I asked Skip Backus whether this verbiage came from La Casa, from John of God's Handlers, and he was quite emphatic that it did.
And so I also asked him how Omega Institute vetted material like this, a presenter.
And this is what he said.
Well, you know, first of all, extensive research online.
We also have many faculty and associates at Omega that have experience in that type of work.
You know, so you look at a bigger picture as you can, have as many conversations as you can, and you go into it for one time.
You try it out.
You see what happens.
And the feedback was so strong positively on the first time we had him and all the times really for that matter.
But in particular, just thinking of the process.
in particular just thinking of the process, we often are in a position of, okay, whenever a faculty is new at Omega, they're watched very closely to see, first of all, are they they're watched very closely to see, first of all, are they a good Do they deliver what their expertise is?
How do they handle the participants that are coming?
Is there anything that we see that's out of line?
And there were no questions.
And the event went very, very well, and the feedback basically off the chart.
So he also described that according to the requests of John of God's handlers, the policy was that John wouldn't be having private appointments.
And...
And this was framed as a way to preserve the medium's energy.
And just to editorialize for a moment, I think that if John of God's handlers were aware of his criminality as per the 2005 ABC report and whatever else was available in Brazil at the time, And that he would not enjoy the protection of the U.S.
police.
I mean, this makes sense as a policy.
He was also traveling with his wife and his daughter at the time.
But remember, I also started by asking Skip about how he first invited John of God.
There was a vague report in 2005, another in 2010.
When I alluded to the possibility that the isolation policy had another purpose, here's what Skip said.
Let's be really clear here.
We did not have any idea about his criminal behavior.
What we were venting was what was asked for by him to keep people away from him.
He did not want to do, he does not hang out with people, he did not present himself in that way at all.
And our job was to keep, because everybody wanted to sit with him, everybody wanted to talk with him, everybody wanted to touch him.
Our job was to keep him separate by his request.
So what about after the 2014 report on Australian 60 Minutes?
We looked into that and couldn't come up with anything that, and again, this is where you get a little bit of hindsight, but couldn't find anything that stuck.
And so for us, again, I think it's because at that point, There was so much activity from a celebrity point of view, you know, more or less confirming that, you know, he was a person of great controversy because he's claiming to do what he does.
And so there are a lot of people that are out to get him or that, you know, want to bring up an inappropriate piece or whatever.
And again, hindsight, could there have been something we missed?
Obviously there was, but not from the standpoint of what was being presented to us or what our inquiries brought forward.
So I asked whether there had been any negative reports about John of God during the Omega events.
So I asked whether there had been any negative reports about John of God during the Omega events.
And Skip emphasized, I think you heard him there, that the feedback was always overwhelmingly positive.
And Skip emphasized, I think you heard him there, that the feedback was always overwhelmingly positive.
And that also without the private meetings, the potential for Zhao to have assaulted participants was very unlikely.
And especially in plain view, probably impossible given that he was always flanked by an Omega Institute security guard.
Now to round out the interview, I asked Skip about whether the John of God experience will change the Omega programming approach.
One of the reasons that I'm so interested in this is that my experience of Omega Institute has been through the Yoga Service Council where I've been a participant, a presenter, and so on.
And so I've known it to be a campus that supports, you know, social justice, you know, feminism, renewal causes.
But I'm looking through your fall schedule and like, I'm wondering if this is sort of a consistent mix historically, because, you know, yes, you have Resmaa Menachem coming, you have the Women's Leadership Council, feminist self-defense, which I found was really cool, especially led by a Brazilian woman.
But then you also have like astrology courses, Awakening Your Inner Healer, and things that would be in the same sort of category of the faith healing or the psychic surgery of John of God, and I'm just wondering whether
knowing more as you do and seeing what has happened with a figure like John of God, have you made any kind of, if not policy changes, like epistemological changes around how you learn about what a person is doing, like epistemological changes around how you learn about what a person is doing, the claims they're making, and whether or not that promotes healthy community
You know, it's always a balancing act here as between our, what I would call more our social initiatives, whether it be sustainability, women's leadership, veterans trauma, mindfulness, you know, the yoga service council, all the service grant programs the yoga service council, all the service grant programs we do that, you know, we've had over 2,000 different organizations come here and use the campus at no charge to them.
And running a program with, you know, past lives or, you know, astrology.
And part of it is, um, there's just a mystery to everything.
I, I, you know, and we're based, you know, on an idea that, um, there's a spiritual basis and connection, um, that, you know, part of what weaves all of, all of our experiences together.
And we can't, to say that astrology is not Valuable or not real or you know intuitive programs I think leaves an entire part of inquiry out and So we've always had a broad spectrum of program content And we'll continue to have that perspective.
although now we're starting to move more and more because we feel that just we're running out of time as a society to deal with some of the so critical issues that we're facing, race, gender, economic inequity, climate.
So we're looking to move more solidly into there.
That's why you see some of the program changes.
That's why you have the Omega Center for Sustainable Living here.
And yet, that's all connected through spirit and an idea that there is an energy that we all share that make us one.
And I'm going to sound very Omega in the way I talk about it.
Today, on the Omega Institute website, you'll find a statement dated December 13, 2018.
This is just days after the global news broke about John of God.
The statement reads, We are profoundly disheartened by the serious allegations of sexual misconduct by João Teixeira da Fria at his facility in Brazil.
As a lifelong learning organization committed to exploring different modalities of holistic healing, Omega offered an opportunity to participate in John of God's programs at our Rhinebeck, New York campus a number of times beginning in 2007 and ending in 2017.
During this period, no such incident was ever reported at Omega.
We know that it takes courage and risk for victims to come forward and share their stories of abuse publicly and that investigations take time.
We are following the story as it develops and hope all the facts come to light so that appropriate and just action can be taken.
Now, there's an update to that statement posted directly below, and it dates almost a year to the day following December 19th, 2019, and it reports that John of God has been sentenced to 19 years and 4 months for 4 rapes of different women, and that he's also facing additional cases related to 10 other crimes, and it finishes with a sentence
We stand with the victims of these horrible abuses of power and are glad to see justice being served.
One more piece before we get to our expert interview.
Covering this story on Conspirituality Podcast, given what we cover, just wouldn't be complete without including this last part.
And it's about how real-world tragedies carry the possibility of provoking tragic overreactions.
We know that the hard data, for instance, on the Epstein network has been like kerosene poured on the fire of QAnon, and something similar might be happening in the John of God situation.
One of the most abject stories circulating around the landscape suggests that Abba Giannia was not the site of John of God's worst crimes.
A Brazilian journalist named Sabrina Bittencourt, who was prominent in some early reporting on John of God, released a video in January of 2019 that was posted to Facebook, in which she described John of God keeping young women imprisoned on a local farm, where he would rape and impregnate them, and then sell their babies to families in Europe and Australia.
The Daily Mirror in the UK picked up the story, but Bittencourt has so far not been able to source and verify her claims, and it's possible that she never will because she may be dead.
Just days after the Daily Mirror's article ran, a rape survivors group in Brazil announced that she had died of suicide in Barcelona, where she was reportedly living under protection from death threats made by John of God's thugs.
Her son reportedly confirmed the death on Facebook, but her body hasn't been recovered, and there are several well-researched media pieces that we'll link to that have cast doubt on whether she is dead at all.
So, we don't know if Sabrina Bittencourt's data on the farm prison is true.
It could be, but it will take a massive investigation to verify it.
That'll take time, it'll take resources, and until it happens, the rumors will persist.
I've noted in previous episodes that it is especially tragic when survivor networks become tangled up in conspiracy theories, because this can lead to a reinforcement of the existing reporting barriers for survivors while also creating potential pathways for re-traumatization.
So I'll just end here by saying that it might make sense that for some, the story of John of God has to become more extreme than it actually was.
Because after all, time and time again, people just don't listen to the truth.
Joining us to explore this story are two experts who live 6,000 thousand miles apart and on opposite poles of the global north global south divide that John of God and the media machine that uncritically platformed him straddled during the latest boom period in new age globalism from the aughts through to the pandemic.
Lisa Braun Doubles has worked in the new age publishing world for over 25 years, both as an in-house publicist and as the owner of her PR agency.
She's worked on The Secret and other best-selling titles, including John of God, the Brazilian healer who's touched the lives of millions.
I'll be asking her about what it was like behind the scenes as the John of God brand went global.
Mirna Wabisabi is a writer, editor, and translator based in Niteroi, Brazil.
She is the founder and managing editor of Plataforma9, an independent media and publishing company.
Her publications are of non-fiction and political theory, focused on anti-capitalism, decoloniality, and feminism.
A lot of her journalist work can be found in Portuguese at Le Monde Diplomatique Brasil and in English at Gods and Radicals Press, where she's an editor and columnist.
I'll be asking Mirna about the social, economic, and political drivers that supported John of God on his rise to power.
I'll be asking her about the reasons for the popularity of Cardassist spiritism in Brazilian history, and about John of God's usage or co-optation of syncretic Brazilian religious movements like Umbanda and Candomblé.
and whether John of God's cozy relationship with military and police forces in Brazil tells us something about the line between strongmen and wizards of religion.
Lisa Braun-Doubles and Myrna Wabi-Sabi, welcome to Conspirituality Podcasts.
Thank you so much for taking the time.
Thank you.
Thanks for having me.
Myrna, I'll start with you, and I hope you'll be able to coach me through my pronunciation.
Jeferia.
Pretty good?
João.
That's fine, yeah.
Okay, so the man who comes to be known as John of God is born in 1942 in the cattle-raising village of Caxeira.
de Goyas in central Brazil, which is in the central part of the country, a little bit to the east.
This is about 260 kilometers from where he winds up in Abadiana, which is also in Goyas.
And this is the town he basically came to own over time.
So he's really a Goyas boy through and through, cradle to grave it would now appear.
And what can you tell us about this part of Brazil in the 1940s and the 1950s when he would have been a boy?
Well, I'm from the real state.
It's around the same region, but it's not the same state.
And I'm young.
I wasn't born until the 80s.
But I can tell you that the region that he's from is known for a pretty powerful industry of mining.
And it comes from a really long, exploitative story.
And the 40s and 50s, I don't know as much as I know about the 60s.
They were the early years before the Brazilian dictatorship.
So there was a very drastic change in Brazil in this time that he witnessed as a young teenager, a young adult in his 20s.
And it's something that today we still deal with a lot in Brazil.
We discussed this.
Bolsonaro came to power very much in the rhetoric of defending this period in our history.
It was a very violent one.
And João de Deus worked within this regime, this military regime.
He profited from it.
He grew within it.
So he's very much a child of of this era where authoritative regimes were idealized.
Now, apparently he is also illiterate, having completed very little primary education, and by his reports, which I don't think we can entirely trust because he's obviously a pathological liar, but it's what we have.
He's also conscripted into working for the family at a very young age, that he goes into his father's tailoring business, so we're set up for a very classic rags-to-riches story, and I'm wondering Given the political backdrop as well, whether there are particular Brazilian elements to this story or stories like this that we should be aware of.
Yeah, I also think that he became really wealthy, yeah, he started working within the military dictatorship for the army.
Yeah.
As a young boy, like in his 20s, so nothing like very high ranking in the military or anything, just more of a service.
But he came to become really wealthy from mining.
I mean, I'm not an expert on João Gideus' part specifically, but knowing this era of Brazil, He just became wealthy with mining.
And being associated with mining money at that particular time would have involved what?
He made money after the military dictatorship.
As a young boy, I think it was more the formative young years of him just wanting to be big and powerful.
And Brazilian dictatorship was basically something from the Cold War.
The United States financed this regime to prevent the Soviet Union from taking hold of the country.
So he I am confident that he didn't endorse Soviet Union regimes or he didn't endorse communism in any way.
And I think there's, it was also a time when there was really, wasn't really a constitutional laws to be followed.
So there was a certain level of exploitation of the land that went rampant.
And I think he has this mentality of just mining and making a lot of money, which now is much more regulated.
In the 90s, because after the military dictatorship ended, we got a new constitution.
One which was, in theory and in principle, supposed to protect indigenous land, give Quilombos their territory as well.
So it was a little bit more progressive.
And it was a little bit principled in protecting nature and so on.
And that's when corruption started coming into his industry.
What before was going on freely, you know, all of a sudden had to be regulated.
But these people didn't want to regulate themselves because they had in their minds that they could do anything they wanted.
They were men, they were powerful, they were rich.
So these regulations, it's almost as if it couldn't really apply to them.
So, my view is that he's very much a corrupt miner, and he profited from that.
I wouldn't be surprised if he's laundered a lot of money through his spiritual endeavors.
Well, turning to that, in his teenage years, I believe that he's 15 when he runs headlong into the Spiritism movement, which currently has tens of millions of followers in Brazil.
I understand that it's a movement indigenized to Brazil and syncretized with Christianity and some non-Christian influences, and the origin is the thought of Allan Kardec, a mid-19th century Frenchman who believed that disembodied saints and healers could entrance special mediums.
So, can you tell us a little bit about Spiritism and, you know, has it crossed your path personally, and what is its influence in everyday Brazilian life?
I've definitely come across it.
I know a lot of people who practice it, go to centers.
My sister, my vet, you know.
Mothers and fathers are friends of mine.
I think it's... I've had even partners who practice it.
It's really common.
And I don't think that the practitioners across Brazil really see João de Deus as representative of their faith.
Um, it's not my faith.
I am spiritual, but...
It is really common.
I gotta say, like, my personal experience, I can tell you.
My vet, for example, has, like, said things to me there about spiritism and sometimes I absorb it and, like, she helped me stop smoking cigarettes, you know?
She says there's some energies.
It's a very... It's hard to see from the outside because it's... It's easy to mock it and see it as really absurd and ridiculous and almost this superstitious kind of...
backwards and old school or outdated perspective of the world.
But it can be really therapeutic for people.
And I don't think Joan de Deus is representative of that.
Is he not representative in what sense, though?
Is it that he created a kind of corporate structure around the form and the ritual?
You know, how is he rejected, let's say, by mainstream spiritists?
Yeah, so let's say, I'll start from what I think is the beginning.
Okay.
Brazil is the country that receives the most African enslaved people in the world.
We were the gateway of the slave trade.
So you have an idea, and I'll put that in scale.
The amount of Africans that died en route to Brazil during the slave trade is the same of the whole number of enslaved people that went to the United States.
Oh my gosh.
Right.
So Brazil has an incredibly large amount of people who are descendants of enslaved people.
And we have a very different relationship with race than the United States because we didn't have a period of segregation.
We had a period of forced miscegenation in order to, as they call it, quotation marks on the radio please, like as a way to minimize or eradicate Africanoid exaggerations.
Oh my gosh.
And that's the language that's used from a particular period, I'm assuming 19th century.
Yes, in this period during the dictatorship and right after when we started to think about Brazilian identity and what it meant, it was very much based on whitewashing in a way.
We had to, in a way, be more white or try to be more white, which is also a type of genocide.
So, with this massive migration from Africa came spirituality from Africa.
And within this matrix, I think Kardec found an environment that was welcoming to something that catered to this culture of African roots, but with a white look and a white Western like image.
So we have Candomblé that is It's not an African religion, so it's a very Brazilian thing, but it's a result from this mass migration, and it's really beautiful.
It's changed a lot.
It's very unique to us.
It's very powerful.
One of her victims, as you said, is Jenny.
She is practicing now after being abused by him, and I'm sure this has helped her a lot, and it's a very powerful tool for strengthening and empowering people who have been You know, taken advantage of.
So Candomblé is an example of how these religions developed in Brazil.
Umbanda on the other hand, it's more mixed with Christianity because you couldn't really practice, they couldn't really practice their African spirituality.
So they had to syncretize, like the syncretism that you brought up.
And then things start to mix.
And he mixed it too.
So he was Catholic and he started to mix with Spiritism.
So he started to cater to a whole range of people in Brazil, from the Catholics to the people who have been exposed to Candomblé and Umbanda and other things.
So it was a very insidious and powerful tool that he took advantage of.
Now, you are describing Kardec as being popular in Brazil in the sense that, you know, he's Christian enough to not upset churches, but also respectful of the medical authorities.
You know, was there also a sense in which Kardec was favored by the middle class because he came from France?
Was there some cachet there?
Oh, for sure.
More than middle class I would say just whiteness.
Okay.
We strive to be more white and this is a very much Brazilian colonial conundrum you know that we we struggle with to this day.
You meet you will meet a lot of black people in the United States that have difficulty calling themselves or you know identifying as black which is very different from the United States where you just you're black or you're not.
Here is Not so black and white, literally.
It's complicated.
And identity, because of this miscegenation period of our history, made it more difficult.
So he was just a white man.
And that's really powerful in Brazil because, in Christianity as well, you see himself like, he compares himself to Jesus.
And we have this problem in Brazil, which is the cult of personality.
And when that mixes with spirituality, it's very dangerous.
And that's something he did really well.
Entities.
You saw in the documentary that they say endorsed by the entity.
And it's pictures of him.
As if he was the entity that he's channeling.
And he did that on purpose.
He did that to... He wanted people to get confused between who he was and who the entity was.
He took advantage of that.
And it's really dangerous.
Now, when spiritism brushes up against the law in Brazil, it's usually because the medical authorities are queasy or protective about, you know, licensed professions and they're not impressed by unauthorized healings.
But at the same time, it doesn't seem like the police were that interested in enforcing licensing laws when it came to John of God.
What can you tell us about the relationship between Spiritism and the state in Brazil?
I would say that it was most definitely corrupt, and I think Brazil struggles with corruption in general, in many places.
I'm pretty sure that there's just a lot of corruption.
And churches, especially Evangelical and Spiritist, are kind of known in Brazil, at least in the leftist circles, as being great places to wash money.
And so it's almost like the more money you watch, the more money you make, the more followers you get because you appear wealthy.
And the appearance of wealth is very attractive to people who are miserable in a country that Where people suffer and they struggle.
So this promise of wealth and well-being in a church is very appealing and they use that.
Now, a church that already is rich because it only exists to wash money.
And by washing money I mean when you have a church you don't pay taxes and you can receive anonymous donations.
So, legally speaking, it's a great place to wash money.
And the more money you watch, the more money you make.
And the more money you make, the richer you look.
And the richer you look, the more followers you get.
It's almost a cliche here.
And when you have that, I guess you can bypass laws.
Now, on the other hand, you have other religions like Candomblé and Umbanda, who don't have that privilege.
And they will be more prosecuted by the police and by other people.
Racist people in Brazil.
So the people who are really prosecuted by the police and marginalized and violated are usually religions like of the African matrix.
The diasporic African religions like Candomblé and Umbanda.
Not so much Spiritism.
Looping back just for a moment before I forget this, speaking of the dynamics of whiteness at play, I'm wondering what to, like, the educated Brazilian eye, the spectacle of the white clothing means at the Casa.
I mean, this is a very common sort of performance of purification or sanctity or something like that.
But I'm wondering if it has this added meaning that somehow this is a place where people come to become more socially pure as well.
Yeah, the color white is something... At New Year's in Brazil, everyone's supposed to wear white.
It doesn't really matter what religion you practice.
Everyone does it.
Even atheists.
It's just become a cultural... It's so intrinsic.
It's so rooted in our culture that everyone does it.
New Year's, if you see someone not wearing white, it's a little weird.
And you wonder why.
And it has a lot of... It's really symbolic.
It's about New beginnings and attracting peace and prosperity.
It's symbolism, but it also comes from the African matrix.
Because in Candomblé, there are entities, there are Orishas, and they have colors assigned to them.
And you have to wear certain colors, and it's a way to honor them.
And I've had situations... I'm sorry, I have dogs.
You do.
So it's difficult to explain, but I can tell before I was very familiar with this.
I started practicing not that long ago.
I've had people look at me.
I'm wearing black on a Friday and they're like, do you want to die?
Why are you doing this?
You know?
And it's just so normal.
And I wear a lot of black, but there's some taboo around wearing that.
So it's something that comes from all From anyone in Brazil, I think.
They would say the power of wearing white.
Lisa, turning to you, can we hear a little bit about what it was like to work in New Age publicity in the aughts, thousands and thousands of miles away from where Myrna is speaking to us from?
Yes, I love you.
I wanted to circle back to Your conversation about the white clothing, which I had read and what was in the book that I worked on about John God is that it was more receptive to energy and it was more conducive to energy working through you.
And so as part of that, whenever you were in the healing room with him, you know, you wanted to make sure that None of your clothing had knots in it, because that would stop the flow of energy.
So they were very clear, you know, wear white so that the energy could work through you.
And then don't Do anything that could stop that current from moving through you, like knots or, you know, waistbands, things like that.
There's also a little bit about covering the head in some, like some practices of Condomblé and Umbanda of protecting your, your head.
And I like that.
I didn't know this about the knots and clothes.
Now, Lisa, you worked on a book about John of God and this is where the information about the clothing came up.
Can you tell us a little bit about how you got introduced to that subject matter and, you know, how you were working in publicity at the time and then this became your gig?
So, I started out working in book publishing and I started out working in religion publishing.
And from that, I transitioned to Llewellyn Publications, which is the largest New Age publisher in the U.S.
And I managed the publicity department there for several years before going out onto my own and freelancing.
And from that, I had worked on a few projects that were With Beyond Words Publishing, which is the publisher of The Secret, and they also published this book on John of God.
So I worked under a contract with them on a contract basis for a couple of years as they, when when they published The Secret, they didn't even have a publicist.
They didn't, they had You know, an assistant publicist who really, you know, was not, she was part-time.
And so I stepped in to help them in the promotion of their titles.
And they had just negotiated a deal with Simon & Schuster for distribution of their books because the demand for The Secret was such that they They needed a larger publisher, somebody that could assure that there would be quantity of inventory.
So that is how I was first, that's how I came to this project.
And the publisher at the time had contracted this book and she was very enthusiastic about it.
And you know, to her credit, she had great instincts, you know, where and And, you know, she had told me about the Atlanta event, which I did not attend.
And in the end, I didn't attend any of his events, not even at Omega.
Now, the Atlanta event was 2006, right?
The Atlanta event was 2005.
Okay.
And that was a test, you know, that was an experiment, you know, to see how well he would do in the U.S.
And, you know, And by how well, I don't just mean like financially, I mean, you know, energetically how he would do outside of Brazil, you know, if he would have the same kind of capabilities, you know, away from Aberiania.
So that is, and I believe that that is the genesis of how the book was contracted was that Atlanta event.
And So there was a lot of enthusiasm for for this book, for his work.
And, you know, from that, you know, there was the publication of the book written by John of God's right hand translator there at the Casa.
And to support that, then there was the Omega event and which You know, was, I believe, the first year capped at 500 people, which, you know, for Omega is a large event, you know, and that's, that's one of their larger events.
And so what you'll find in books that were published during that time is that, you know, a book is content.
And this is when authors, especially in MindBody, you know, became more platforms.
And this is kind of, you know, at the beginning of social media, you know, Friendster, I think, is just, you know, in my space, we're new, you know, and so everything was very grassroots and, um, like with the secrets and like with what the belief, you know, a lot of that was,
Promoted by, in a very grassroots way, you know, screenings at, you know, unity churches and centers for spiritual living and somebody's, you know, book club, you know, very large book club or, you know, it was, it was that kind of grassroots activity that kind of creates this critical mass where
You know, there's a trade show that's held every year called the International New Age Trade Show.
And it's really where all of the New Age publishers, you know, or who publish in that genre will exhibit.
And, you know, it's geared towards metaphysical booksellers.
And the year before The Secret was released, there was really, there was talk.
You know, have you seen this film, you know, The Secret?
And so that's really how, you know, it was that rolling mass, you know, that builds and builds and builds until you can't ignore it.
Here, you know, it's, here it is.
And that was your job was to sort of gauge how that ball could start rolling and where you could find that word of mouth networking power and to find the demographic that would be interested in the content.
That's your gig, right?
Yeah.
You know, how do we create the ball?
And then, you know, once we've created the ball, you know, how do we get the media to cover it?
Yeah, so that's the next step.
But, you know, backing up a little bit, everything that we just heard Myrna describe about some of the context for where this guy is coming from, was that part of your kind of of your field of awareness at the time.
Did you know much about the Spiritism tradition in Brazil, its links to Evangelical Christianity, or prior figures in this medium movement like Dr. Fritz?
Did you have some background?
I did!
Yeah, right.
Did you have some back?
I did.
Okay.
Well, you know, Llewellyn being the largest New Age publisher in the U.S. also published a magazine called Fate Magazine.
And so I think it was, the byline was stories of the strange and unexplained.
And, you know, so that was something that they covered him in...
Fate Magazine and so I was aware of him from that but also you know when I was a kid I was weird growing up and I would read about stuff like this and I would you know check out books at the library about you know spiritism and spiritualism and cryptozoology and you know it was just always looking for something outside of myself you know I want to believe
And so I was aware, and Dr. Fritz being the hypothetical German surgeon that was channeled, he's been channeled by a number of people who have all died very horrible deaths, mostly automobile accidents.
And then I think another channel who was murdered very horrifically, something like that.
So I was aware of Dr. Fritts and also, you know, Alan Kardec.
So I did have some awareness and, you know, so when the book came to me, you know, these were all concepts that I had seen before and, you know, and also, you know, I had some familiarity with Uh, Hoodoo and Candomblé and, you know, the Afro-Cuban religions.
And so, you know, and Santeria.
And so, it, I was not surprised.
You know, this is something that I knew.
When you started working on the promotion for the John of God book, and now, now just to be clear, this is the, the book written by Heather Cummings, is that right?
Yes.
Okay.
Heather was his translator.
I have the introduction, the first page of that book, right in front of me.
So just for a little taste, we have the entity, Dr. Jose Valdivino, called for his instruments again, and I opened the special drawer and carefully removed the tray and took the instrument tray to him.
He chose a paring 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, and 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 something from deep inside that only the entities can see.
The entity looks into the eye as a representation of the whole body system, not limited to the physical eye.
I understand this as a symbolic removal on the physical level, but originating from many levels and involving many different organs.
So, you would have gotten that book and opened it up and seen the beginning of this really fascinating story.
Yes.
And so, I think that that was one of...
Um, I think there were more than 30 entities.
That was one of the 30.
And, you know, this really, um, you know, scraping eyes and, you know, putting forceps up noses and twisting, you know, you'll hear that later on within the book.
And it is something that You know, I did have some discomfort about it and I did, you know, voice some objections.
I want to make sure that people aren't being harmed, you know, and I was given assurance that, you know, these are people who all who opt into it, you know, that's nobody, you know, everybody who had, he's given permission, you know, and, uh,
You know, and I was also, I had some concern about boundaries, especially with women and, you know, and touching and was assured that, you know, it's always in the presence of someone else.
And, and, you know, so I accepted that at face value and, you know, in retrospect, I should have questioned it more.
You know, there's something.
bizarre, grotesque, and I would say somewhat transgressive about the surgeries themselves in a way that's like completely different from the mood and aesthetics of most new age, you know, environments, which tend to avoid bodily details as much as possible. environments, which tend to avoid bodily details as much as There's a lot of like draping and, you know, soft lighting, and it's really not about forceps and serrated blades on kitchen trays.
You know, there's this big difference between crystals and medical waste.
And so I'm wondering if that was a kind of strange marketing challenge as well, that, you know, here is a type of content that really comes, and I want to ask you about this, Myrna, as well, from an other place, if we're talking about what's common in the if we're talking about what's common in the bourgeois global north.
Yeah, you know, I don't know that anyone ever questioned me about it.
I don't know that You know, I don't, I don't recall, and you know, this has been several years, but I don't recall anyone ever objecting and saying, this is, you know, this is gross.
This is not okay.
Nobody ever said that, you know, but what I, what they did say is, oh my God, you know, this healing is miraculous, you know, and
Willing to allow this to happen if the outcome is miraculous, you know, this person has been healed and I think that people will do very desperate things and allow for very, you know, grotesque things for the sake of a miraculous healing.
Yeah, and things that also seem to focus upon extraction.
That's the other thing that I've noticed is that it's always that something is being pulled out of the person.
And Myrna, is that a common theme within Spiritism and the related religious traditions that you're familiar with, that for a person to become well, often they have to be, you know, something must be removed.
I'm not sure about spiritism, to be honest, but I can tell you about Candomblé that There is something called Tesguado.
There's something that it's sometimes it's a part of your spiritual healing to refrain from doing certain things.
For example, spending a month without drinking alcohol or a few weeks without having sex or having certain baths or cleansing with leaves and specific types of leaves.
So there is a washing, cleansing, but very different from actual surgery and not very different from what we do in Christianity, which also has the whole fasting thing.
And all religions have this in some level, you know, but I'm not so sure about the whole actual surgery and removing and like using medical supplies.
I do think that João de Deus is very much his own thing, and I know I already said it before, he's not necessarily representative, but I also think that he corrupted the spiritual practice when he made himself an entity.
He's not channeling anything ancestral or anything spiritually powerful.
He wants to be this power.
I think he always wanted that.
You know, you said that before and you make a great point about The fact that his portrait appears everywhere in the hotels and the retail shops in Abidjanja that this place has been blessed by the entity and there he is grinning at you and of course he's also spending a lot of time saying to
to, you know, ABC or, you know, Australia 60 Minutes and Oprah, that he doesn't do the healing himself, that the healing comes from God, that he's the channel.
So he's speaking out of both sides of his mouth, but there's also, um, he's, he's laying claim to 30 entities.
And is that in itself, uh, a kind of sign of, sign of, of overreach or are there medium traditions in which a single medium would be able to have contact with different, uh, with different entities?
I'm not sure, but I would say that it's definitely overreaching and it's definitely a sign of his spiritual inconsistency because it's true that when you see someone incorporate an entity, even if you're not a It is a powerful experience.
I've witnessed events that are really strong and I've seen, for example, sacrifices of animals.
I'm a vegan, by the way, and I've witnessed it and I've seen the power of it and I I very much believe that when you do see someone incorporate an entity, it's difficult to see that person when they're not incorporating the same way as you did before.
There is a thing that you look at this person as if there was something powerful in them.
You do have an admiration and respect for this person that goes beyond hierarchy.
So there's a lot of hierarchy in Candomblé too.
So it does have this idea of power and there's some people who have been there for longer and then you earn some space and you work your way through.
It's a very long journey.
So when you do see someone incorporate, it's a powerful thing and you do have a certain level of respect even when they're not incorporating.
But at the same time, usually terreiros, which are the shrines of Candomblé and Umbanda, It's not centered on one man, you know?
It's several women sometimes.
It's a community.
So there is hierarchy, but it's a hierarchy that's much more diluted in the community than one man's A journey to power.
Quite frankly, I see him as someone who just really took advantage of power and he wanted to be powerful.
It's different.
It sounds like Umbanda and Candomblé both potentially pose a real alternative and perhaps something more original to this kind of authoritarian Christo-fascism that we see at the Casa.
And I'm just wondering if it was, now you've said that He wasn't necessarily representative of Spiritists, and I have seen other sources who have said that there are Spiritist figures in Brazil who reject John of God, but were you aware of any practitioners of Umbanda or Candomblé, or is there discourse from those communities now about
John of God and, you know, what he was doing, what he represents?
Not really.
I think it's so, especially from the condom black community, it's so different, distant from them that they don't even bother us even discussing any type of association.
It's very out there.
But of course we all have an opinion and we are all touched by the situation because I think it's it's horrific and it's no laughing matter what happened to those women.
So I think we're all touched by it not necessarily from the type of spirituality he practiced but more from the position of like look what powerful men do.
Now If he is representative of something, it's not necessarily of this religion in particular, but of the role white men play in Brazilian society, historically speaking.
I live in a very patriarchal society and spiritual leadership, it's a very difficult and Tricky thing, because it's easy to take advantage of people's vulnerabilities.
Kind of like a therapist, you know?
There's a reason why you don't date your therapist.
There are people who have a reach in you, and you have to trust them, and this bond of trust is really important.
So I personally am very suspicious of any one single figure of spiritual leadership.
And this is something, it goes for all religions.
It goes for priests of the church.
It goes for evangelism.
So it goes anywhere.
I think it could also happen in Candomblé.
And I've heard this a lot.
And I'm sorry to say, but Brazil, John of God is not the only one.
He was perhaps the biggest one.
And we deal with this a lot.
There are spiritual leaders who Abuse.
It happens.
And there are more stories of it.
We've had situations like that with, you know, Catholic priests.
And we even had a woman, Flor Delis, I don't know if you've heard about her.
I have not, no.
She was a pastor, a Protestant pastor from my town, but she was famous everywhere in Brazil because she was a gospel singer.
And she was arrested, well, it's still happening, but she was arrested for murdering her husband and she had like 50 children and she was dating one of them.
And it's a very different type of, yeah, it's a whole thing.
It's a very different type of abuse, but it is very much about spiritual leadership and the power that comes with it.
It can happen.
It can happen anywhere.
Myrna, you've said several things that make me want to ask what might be a little bit of a complex question.
I didn't realize before we started that you're actually a practitioner of Candomblé, it sounds like.
And so I guess what I want to ask is for the
Disenchanted and I would say, I don't know, almost cultureless global northerner who looks at this story and says, wow, well, all of that stuff is clearly fraudulent.
That if somebody comes and says that they are a spirit medium, that they are channeling, that they're able to do some kind of healing intervention that takes the shape that they're able to do some kind of healing intervention that takes the shape of mystical
But you're in a position where, as part of your own practice, you're not going to be able to do that.
You're, I would imagine, able to see the difference between what works and what is a lie.
So, how do you walk that line and what would you say to the person who is just absolutely disgusted by the whole notion that An entire generation of people could be deceived by a mockery really of spirituality.
This is a really tough question because I am very much a lone practitioner.
I don't belong to a Tejedo and I don't have a spiritual leader.
So my spiritual practice is very much Alone with myself.
I take guidance from people but I'm not a member of anywhere or anything.
Shrine.
So I wish I had that answer for people because My answer to it has been to just not affiliate myself with any institution.
I am just very suspicious of authority.
So at the same time that I really respect and admire a lot of spiritual leaders and there are writers, you know, there are black women who practice Candomblé who are writers that I'm a huge fan and I read them all the time.
But I don't know how to exist in a religious institution with hierarchy and know when to identify or how to identify when power is being abused.
I don't know and I wish we knew.
I don't know and I guess my way to shield myself from that is to practice at home.
Well, I was going to say that it also sounds like you don't know how to live without some kind of practice, too.
Yes.
So that's not really an option.
It all started, I think, more out of curiosity.
I used to, as a journalistic curiosity, I used to attend a lot of events.
And a journalistic and a political interest, too.
I was really interested in decolonial initiatives.
Politically speaking.
So I think I entered this on intellectual exercise.
What are Brazilians doing to combat Eurocentrism, white supremacy?
What are we doing?
What are we up to?
And I entered some Pan-Africanist initiatives and some Candomblé events, some Umbanda events, some indigenous initiatives.
I was really interested in participating in that on a political level.
But as I got exposed to it, I can't help but feel it.
When I show up wearing black, just totally naive, and someone tells me, do you want to die?
I'm thinking, no, I never thought of that before.
And then I start thinking, why do I do what I do?
Why do they do what they do?
And what does this mean?
And how could this?
It's difficult for it to not play a role in your life somehow.
So, I have it in my heart now more, as opposed to in the beginning that I had it more in my brain, like intellectual exercise.
But I covered a lot of events that, honestly, I've cried.
I've had entities tell me things that I've cried out of nowhere.
I was so taken by their words.
I've had entities be weird and hit on me and do weird stuff and I've had very powerful events, all sorts of stuff.
And I just, I feel it.
It's had a good influence on me.
Lisa, when you look back at working on that particular book and How it ended up influencing the course of John's global ascendancy.
How do you feel about it?
Like, how do you, how do you sum that up now for yourself?
Not great.
You know, I've thought about this a lot and especially, you know, now as we enter this, you know, well not enter, we're in this post-truth world and
You know, it was always my personal philosophy, you know, I think it was Coleridge who, you know, talked about the suspension of belief and, you know, the ability to believe to, you know, very discreet things.
And, you know, the critical thought that's necessary, you know, you can suspend your belief, you know, It's not true.
And I see how some of my actions, platforming and bringing some of this work to the world, I never want to be associated with anything that causes harm.
I totally understand.
But it's not on you, you know?
That's the thing.
It's just one person who was so corrupt.
He was so corrupt.
Yeah.
And he ends up corrupting us, right?
But it's not us.
We didn't welcome this, you know?
We didn't enable it.
And that's what I meant before.
Sometimes we wanted to be real, you know?
And he exploited that.
So it's not really about our vulnerability of us, you know, because if we are stronger and more perceptive and tougher, they will also, they're so corrupt that they will find ways to, you know, they will make their tactics better.
So the more we are better at preventing this kind of stuff, the better they get at corrupting more.
And I think these people sometimes, They spent their time finding ways to get their way and corrupt us, and it's not really about how we defend ourselves from them.
I've seen like the strongest people, the more perceptive people, be taken advantage of just because The people that are taking advantage of them are pros, you know?
They've spent their whole lives, they built careers on top of corrupting people.
We can do our best, but it's all on them, you know?
100% on them.
You know, in that vein, Myrna, there are global implications to this story.
Because, you know, John of God is not a medium.
He's a raping gangster, a strong man who used spirituality to con a lot of people.
And he enjoyed the support of the police and the military and the government, it would seem, given his release to house arrest.
That seems a little bit lenient.
And currently, as we know, there's another populist strongman who casts an even longer shadow across Brazil and the world.
And I'm wondering, rounding up here, what can the story of John of God tell us about the tactics and the culture and the power that supports somebody like Bolsonaro?
Yeah, much like how John of God had this power over people, I see you guys, you know, like you're influenced by this and you Lisa have a community that's been touched by this and it is bigger than Brazil.
And Brazil, Brazilian politics is bigger than Brazil.
As a journalist, I have to deal with British or American editors that tell me, well, but the story's about Brazil.
Why are you bringing up Syria?
Why are you bringing up?
No, because Brazil, the Brazilian story is like always the whole world.
You know, there is this cliche of the Amazon being important for the whole world.
You know, I think It is all of our responsibility.
Brazil doesn't exist in a vacuum.
Brazilian colonization and the culture and the identities that we struggle with here, we don't exist in a vacuum.
We're very much like touched by everything and we touch everything.
So it breaks my heart when it touches in such a violent way.
And at the same time, Yeah, Bolsonaro breaks my heart.
It breaks my heart that Bolsonaro is president.
And I have family members who voted for him.
And I don't cope with it anymore by trying to campaign or change it, you know?
I'm not interested in convincing people that João de Deus is abusive.
If people want to believe that he was a, you know, that he's being, I don't know, It's something unfair happening to him.
I don't want to convince anyone of anything anymore.
I don't have the energy.
And when it comes to Bolsonaro, I don't have the energy to convince Bolsonaro supporters to not... Like, he speaks for himself, you know?
If you see that and you go for it, like, there's nothing I can say, you know?
And sometimes you have to think about ourselves and our own community and heal yourselves, you know?
Like, heal ourselves.
And that's what I work on.
I'm trying to heal my community and I really hope that in itself is enough to take him down in the long run.
But we have this problem in Brazil.
It's the cult of personality.
We want a man to save us.
We want that one guy that's going to pretty much come down from the sky and rescue us.
It's scary.
We had that with John of God.
We have this with Bolsonaro, like, this is the one man to save us, you know, and we have that on the left with Lula.
Lula is very much a Messiah figure as well.
We can't escape it.
We had, before Bolsonaro was president, we had, um, Lula for two terms, and then Dilma, which was a woman, for two terms.
And everyone says how great it is that Brazil had a female president.
She only made it to the presidency for her association with Lula, for being from her party and her prodigy.
So as a feminist, as a woman, I think that's a blow.
It doesn't give me the satisfaction it should.
Not to mention that I don't really put my hopes and dreams on a president.
But...
We have this, I very much work to destroy this cult of personality around one man and it's very crystal fascist.
I like the term, you know, like it's this Christian thing.
It's this idea that God is a man and his son is going to save us and the only purpose of a woman is to give birth to that man, you know, and I very much reject that.
A narrative, that outlook in the world.
And I live by that.
I'm sorry to say that voting isn't going to be enough to dismantle that.
You know?
But I hope something is.
Any last thoughts, Lisa?
Thanks for providing the safe container for me to talk about this.
Something that, you know, obviously I feel very emotional about.
Yeah, thank you.
No, I really think this conversation is wonderful.
Thank you.
I also appreciate the opportunity to share.
I think I have, my work is very much around decolonial initiatives and movements, you know, and John of God is also really painful for me to look too closely into, you know, research too carefully.
I did some research before this conversation which was mostly watched that doc I knew about him before but I didn't watch that documentary and it's really painful and I think it's not something easy to dig into and I I think I also have some resistance to it
I feel what these women went through too much, but I also think it's important for us to talk about it to bring justice and make sure it doesn't happen again.
And I just also just want to say that your sentiments around John of God and Bolsonaro are too large to address directly in terms of convincing their supporters that somehow they're fraudulent, that they speak for themselves.
You know, you said my concentration is going to be upon my community, and I immediately thought of, oh, and that's going to be your Condomblé shrine, but then I know that you practice alone, so I'm wondering if you're going to have to find a shrine sometime, or maybe even start one yourself?
Good point.
Yeah, my community is in the making.
But yeah, it's not just spiritual.
I do it around my work, my writing, who reads me and who I work with.
Hey everyone, thanks for listening.
It was a very heavy episode, I know, so I hope you're able to unplug and take a walk.
I want to thank Derek and Julian for the reporting support, and Derek for production.
I want to thank Skip Backus for agreeing to speak with me about a difficult subject.
This is a story I know I'll be continuing to study and report on.
As I mentioned, I think it says something important, not only about spiritual abuse, but about the globalized networks we live in that we're so often confused by that commodify our yearnings, but that can also allow us to connect to sources of repair.
So, I'll keep you posted, and I'm happy for any feedback or leads you send my way.
