From Neoplatonism to Prophetic Madness: Why the NAR Isn’t Christian

Hello and welcome to another episode of the William Branham Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Branham Historical Research at William-Branham.org and with me I have my co-host and friend, Steve Montgomery, author of the converging apostasy and a quick outline of hands-on eschatology, a matter of timing and agency. And together we're examining the themes of apostasy in the New Apostolic Reformation and its history. Steve is good to be back and to talk all things apostasy and I'm going through just skimming through some of the news today of the mess that is happening in Christianity right now and it's

very evident to see from the fruits that are displayed what this tree was made of and I'm glad you're here to help me examine the tree. Yeah, John, as always loads to talk about. You said you were seeing things this morning before getting ready for this podcast. It happened to look at Holly P. Vellka, I think that's how you pronounce your last name. And she has a podcast that's written several books about the NAR and in her latest article she says one of the worst things to abuse and misuse Christianity is to unrightly say God told me to

someone or you can say it over the TV or in your book, the Lord has put it on my heart. And what it makes me think of is in the in the Old Testament where God says he seems very unpleased and he says these prophets say let's say at the Lord when the Lord has not spoken. So you can see it's kind of a part it's like an atom bomb that you're attempting to toss around when you use words like those and I'm pretty hard pressed to think of any time that you can use those

search of words and use them well. The wiring that up is because speaking on behalf of God or on behalf of Jesus or behalf of the Holy Spirit has somewhat of a connection to what I was preparing for for this podcast and that is oddly enough Neoplatonism. So the impact that Neoplatonism has had on the esoteric world all the way back to very early days.

and the way sort of made its way trickle down effect to the NAR today

has a lot to do with perfection with the help of angels. And so if you're saying God told me or an angel told me or had a vision which is fairly common in the NAR today, you're actually lining up with with an older, more established, pretty much a cult kind of state of mind which occurs when you're into neoplatonism. So what is it? Well, a lot of ways to answer that, but just a very brief introduction as I found this, which I was unaware of at first, just even though it began in the third century, the word neoplatonism comes from early 19th century

European scholarship. So those that say, well, yeah, you know, started before the days of Christ, maybe there were some things leading up to it, but not really. Then Christian, Islamic and Jews philosophers have appropriated neoplatonist thought. This is the reason for its broad influence that it's had over the years. And as I said, this influence can be felt even in the NAR today in some ways. You know, whenever I hear somebody come up to me and they'll say, God put it on my heart to tell you or God, God told me to say this to you. My first thought is, okay, I'm going to shut off

my thinking because they're voicing their opinion to me. And where it gets really weird, I know how this works because I have been in the movement. I know the feeling once you, once you put yourself into the same hype that the movement is generating, you start to think that everything that you do is righteously inspired. And so when you have an opinion about somebody or especially if you have something that you think that they need to change their ways for, God puts it on your heart to change their ways. And what's really sad is it comes all the way down to just personality

conflicts. You can have somebody whose personality type doesn't match yours. Well, God's going to put it on your heart to change them to conform to your personality. But no, man, that's not the way God does it. So in the end, what it is when somebody says this, they're filled with righteous indignation. And I know I'm going to get hate mail for that one because there are people that truly, truly believe in these movements. And even people I've spoken with who have escaped these movements, they truly feel that God has spoken to them and God is using them as a prophetic voice.

They won't use the term prophetic voice and they would be scared if you were to try to say it. But that's exactly what they're doing. The movement has indoctrinated them to think that And every whim of their mind, every opinion, every thought, every feeling that's God inspiring them to speak and do and act.

And people are people, man. If I have a personality conflict, I may say, you know, that rubs me the wrong way. But I'm not gonna say, God told me that you need to change to conform to fit my personality needs.

Yeah, and that right. The previous thing that we did, which should be out by now that people are listening to this is kind of my personal story. And how many times I was in a group, you know, they have to do with the lettering influence and word of faith stuff.

So how many times I heard of you who said directly or implied that God is speaking to my fellow nibb of this group. And how manipulative that is. And I just think, you know, I'm not the judge of those people who say stuff like that.

But I'm thinking, how will they stand before God and say, oh, yeah, I thought everybody how it was on your behalf. Well, it's not a great idea. But as far as this early version of some of this stuff is neo-plaketanism.

So I was thinking, looking into some of the streams of thought that led into it. And so these are gonna be some areas, John, that I know. You have looked at in the past.

One was the Egyptian mystery school, so mystery religions and they range from around 600 to 300 BC. So they were kind of laying the groundwork for some of these ideas. Then, you know, being neo-plaketanism, it just goes to, it's not a surprise that Plato had a big influence on this.

And so Plato's writings would have been around 425 to 340A, that's what I found about him. And then you have the chaulialin oracles. Again, someone speaking or even a statue, it's John, he had some interesting stories about that, speaking through these statues.

And so you get messages from God or from one of the gods. And so that's occurring in and around 200 BC. And then you have a very interesting fellow that I find it was hard to get a lot of information about him.

But his name was Julian, the fergist. And fergist is not part of his given name, but a fergist or fergicy is the act of calling down the angels

and then commanding them. And if anybody's heard that kind of talk in the NAR, well, they probably have heard that kind of talk. So yeah, there's precursors to all that kind of business. And interestingly enough, This is something I've seen elsewhere.

Judean, he supposedly was an initiate of the God of the so-called Seven Rays. So let's look at a little bit of his legacy as a beginner

of some of the neo-plates and his ideas. So we can easily see his ideas in the occult or the esoteric world. And he's one of the big figs of the cult world would be Helena Bulbowski, writing in the late 1800s.

So on your third volume of the secret doctrine, which I do not recommend anybody to read it. It's really disgusting stuff and very, it swims around from this idea to that idea. It's not very well organized.

But in that book, she talks about the Seven Primeval Rays, and defines them as angelic beings associated with the Seven Planets of the ancient world. They didn't have the knowledge, the reading nowadays. So that's in the occult.

Also in the occult world in the 1920s through the 1940s, you get the writings of the so-called Christian esotericist, Alice Bailey. And she also had things to say about these Seven Rays. She'd call them energies sometimes, and that everybody is related to one of these Seven Rays or energies.

But then somebody I think I remember we talked about her at one point. She's actually part of a cult, and it was called Ket, church, universal and triumphant. So in about 1987, and she was definitely a new-aged teacher and cult leader.

Elizabeth Claire Proffitt began to talk about the Seven Rays. Okay, that hops us over to the Christian world, which you would think is not really related to the occult world. So the latter brain and the Britain influence teacher, David Ebel, who was also into Christian identity, I remember we talked about that.

So Ebel says the Jewish and Gentile tradition plus the Bible, for good measure, shows that heaven is seven concentric rings or bands. Now, I don't have my notes to give a direct quote from him, but he said something similar to Britain, and that was that our goal, obviously, is the center.

So we're going through these seven rings or bands, and it really sounds like Kabbalah, which already know that Britain and Ebel were into. And then much more recently, we have a really mystifying thing to talk about the NAR.

This is on the reawakened American tour. And the Nara Philly, a general Michael Flann, of course, retired and expunged of all his wrong theory by someone, he prayed that we'd become instruments of the Sevenfold Rays and all of the Archangel's.

That sounds somewhat out of place, but there you go. You know, talking about the Seven Rings, et cetera, there's different variations of this. I've studied this heavily because, well, in my last book, I was going through Christian identity and I was digging into, where did this mess come from, why is it's not just centralized to Branum.

There's no way to say that he is the one who brought it forward, but he did popularize a lot of it. And there was this weird theory and Christian identity that the great pyramid of Giza was in fact a road map of time.

And as they were digging up and the tunnel that goes down to the King Chamber, there was apparently there were imperfections in the path and they would say this imperfection is whenever the stark market crashed and the great depression happened and they would go through these different scenarios of what these building blocks of the pyramid admit, which is crazy, crazy stuff, but they would hold conventions.

There'll be hundreds of Christian ministers who are enthralled with itching ears who would come as some guy lectured on what the great pyramid of Giza meant. And over time, they began to think that it was a Bible of sorts.

And that was predominantly the belief in the early years of the Laterane, Branum talks about it. He said the first Bible was written was the zodiac and the second one was the great pyramid of Giza.

And then he would hold up his Bible and say the third one is this one we have here today. What happened is they started evaluating different aspects of the pyramid because if the pyramid is this great mystery, well, how does that relate to the afterlife?

And so then they began much like we talked about the people who were saying God spoke to me. God was speaking through them, trying to say that these building blocks in the pyramid admit different things.

And one of them, Branum talks about how your body is made of cosmic light, which you and I know all of the occultish symbolism that go behind that. But he would say one of these days this cosmic light in your body is going to come out of this body and you're going to go through the first dimension, the second, the third, the fourth.

You're going to go through ascending through all the dimensions and eventually you'll end up in the seventh dimension, which is heaven. And he had various ways to describe this and he says, Jesus is sitting in the seventh dimension.

Well, he also, he started drawing out on blackboard when he'd hold these presentations. And he would say that this is directly tied back to the great pyramid of Giza. And apparently I've not been inside of it, so I don't know what it's like, but apparently Currently there are somewhere seven steps going up into the King's Chamber.

He would say these seven steps represent these seven dimensions and he goes and he maps it all out mathematically, which is the funny part because he claimed to be illiterate, but he somehow knew the higher math of the pyramids.

But people just ate this up and it started to spread and you find even, I think I put a video out on it recently at Morningstar. They had this great, I don't know what you call it, this great rally around Brannum's ministry.

They even had Brannum's drawing of the pyramid and the seventh, I guess this was the seven church ages that they were listing out, but it goes into the form of a dimension, right? They see these ages are dimensions of time and we're going to go through dimensions of space.

You're going to be cosmic light. There's all kinds of weirdness, but in the end, it's all the occult. Yeah, that's very interesting, John, when I was getting prepared for this and thinking about Eboa and the Seven Heavens, I looked at this by chance I ran into some things about Brannum and I didn't find what you were talking about to that extent, but certainly the idea is about the seven churches and all of his readings about revelation.

But a fifth thing that leads up to, or led up to Neoplatonism, is someone that we've talked about quite a bit and that is the Gnostic Valentines, his disciples and his views on angels.

And this would have been coming around the year 150 AD. So according to Valentines is possible to draw angelic spirits down from heaven to be joined with you. Okay, again, think the gnar, we're not that far from what some of the guys say in that group.

And this is why Valentines told his followers, now this should sound very familiar. I've heard several podcasts that you've done to talk about this. Valentines told his followers to quote, allow the seat of light to take up its abode in your bridal chamber, receive your bridegroom, take it into you and be taken by him.

That could be like a broad, I mean, a podcast or one or two or three, just on the wording he'd use there and the way it relates to things we've seen in the gnar and elsewhere.

So, but we can follow this up a bit with one of Valentines's disciples, Theodotus. He said that the angels had need of us so that they may enter into perfection. That's without us, it is not permitted to them.

I believe If I heard that from Wesley Swift, but just from tons of different sources, you'll hear that kind of talk where without us, and they're quoting something from or expanding upon something from Hebrews that talks about without us, they may not receive the promise.

So you know, but obviously this kind of interpretation is incorrect. So this is kind of a duck question, but it's the NAR in this same esoteric tradition of calling down angels. The New Apostolic Reformation copied its financial strategies off of things that pre-existed the NAR, as we both know.

And one of the strategies, I don't know if you've read through them, but if you read through the early editions of the magazine that Brannum started, and eventually Gordon Lindsey took over, the voice of healing, and also study what led to the creation of that magazine.

Even predating this, you had all of these revivalists who came from town to town, and they're saying that they couldn't heal with great miracles, and they're all trying to become greater than one another.

There's this battle to become the biggest tent, which is a weird, weird thing if you think about it. But in the battle of tents, you had ministers who are claiming that they have greater miracles than the next guy.

And if you go look in the newspapers, you can find this. They're saying great, great signs and wonders, great miracles. He has a great healing ministry. Well, there came a point when you're flooded with these guys that are claiming the same thing.

There's not something that really gives them an edge, they're all equals, and you can't have a battle for the tents unless some guy has the edge. Well, the earliest I've been able to find is Brannum, but I'm certain there were others before him.

Brannum starts claiming that he had this angel that inspired his whole ministry, an angel from heaven came down and told him this stuff. And it's crazy, man. If you have a newspapers.com subscription and just look what happened immediately after this, you had angels left and right.

It was like God was sending floods of angels down to this healing ministry. And everybody's claiming I had an angel, I too had an angel, like Oprah, you too can have an angel. It's just, it gets crazy when you think about it.

And then what happened is Brannum kind of, there's a mental health issue that happened. There's some history behind that that we've only partially published, but around 1948 or maybe his early 1949, he goes off the scene and nobody knows where he is.

He's actually in a mental institution from what I have heard. But he goes off the scene, Gordon Lindsay takes over everything. And now without Brannum, the key, the one who sparked all this revival movement, they start introducing new guys, well, Brannum had that that angel. And so the others have to have some similar weirdness. So they all start claiming, I had an experience. I had an angel. I had this. I had that the other.

They didn't even have two angels. They would have made them, you know, superior. They had two, three, like, look, here they are. If you count Brannum's different versions of his angel, in some instances, he says it's a clean, shaving guy, another one looks like an Arab, another one's white beard, his varying descriptions means he had like 20, I don't know how many, he actually claimed. But what it is, they have, in this history is proven too, they were tied to the Kardashian family. The ones who became entertainment giants, right? So they were creating an entertainment persona. I don't truly believe that they had angels, although some of them

may have had some mental health issues and thought they did. But the fact that they're all claiming it, it turned into some other religion because this isn't how God works. In the Bible, God sent his Holy Spirit. God did not send an angel down to make you conform to the beliefs of some random guy.

Yeah, interesting stuff. And of course, renewing the esotech world, there's angels all over the place. And so some of the streams of thought that were influenced by Neoplatonus, and they had plenty of angels in their pockets, was Kabbalah, which is a very big one in the occultic world. And why that's even pertinent to discussions about the Nare and about the Laterane is because some of the prophets who influence Nare prophets, some of the Laterane prophets actually dealt into the Kabbalah and received some of their ideas from that. So Neoplatonus influence Kabbalah indirectly through their writings about demons, any of us, of D-A-E-M-O-N-S, or spirits. Now

to today's ears, or when you read the word, it looks like demons, but at the time that these ideas were circulating, it meant something a little bit broader, not necessarily evil, but just an angel or spirit. So yeah, Neoplatonus influence Kabbalah with their ideas about that.

And then one of the other big things about the occultic world, who also happened to be a huge influence on Jaint Leed, who led up to the Laterane with her prophecies, that's Jacob Bourne.

So Neoplatonus influence Bourne indirectly by passing on to him elements of here comes Valentinian mysticism. And so yeah, Valentinus just pops up his head all over the place. Then we come to the 17th century.

Profit has chained lead and her influence on the laterane profits. Neoplatism happens to have influenced lead indirectly by her surge for contact between humanity and angelic spirits, whose she thought were acting as intermediaries.

You know, the inner mediaries, that's really the thing that drove me to try to understand what was really behind all of this mass because as much as I studied it, I would have liked to have said it's just entertainment and it's financially backed and that's why they're all looking for money. But some of the men that I've examined outside of Branum, they were not really focused so much on the money. There's something else driving them and what is it? And ironically, I hadn't left the church and I had left the Branum cult and I was in one of the new churches

and they were focusing their sermons on teachings on the Holy Spirit. They got into basically lining up different Bible passages talking about the Holy Spirit and the dangers of people who are usurping the authority of the Holy Spirit. And that whole line of thinking got me to try to understand what were these guys doing if they were actually reading their Bibles, which many of them claimed that they were and teaching from it. They would all know that what they're essentially doing is usurping the power of the Holy Spirit with these angelic forms, these beings, these, you know, men randomly saying, thus say at the Lord or some similar

verbiage to try to say that God is speaking through them for whatever is the political agenda that they had, etc. And I began to thinking, well, what was driving it? What was causing them to try and even usurp the Holy Spirit in the first place? And that led me down all kinds of questions.

Where they even Christian was one of the first ones that came to mind, but then I get to thinking about so the Spirit that they claimed that they had what was the Spirit. Yeah, and this is kind of jumping ahead, but no reason not to is when you talk about usurping the Holy Spirit. Well, it happens that one of the latering prophets, who is directly influenced by Jean Leed, who, as I've said, is directly influenced by me or Platonism, and all of that comes out to be his name is Royal Crownquist. And so I very distinctly remember in some of his,

he calls me Pistols of the Kingdom, so he's speaking on behalf of Jesus. He says, watch for them. They will come. My perfect coming ones will lead you into all truth. Well, talk about not paying attention to what the Bible says. That's, it's very mystical what he's talking about, but it's...

It's in direct opposition to scripture. So something, you know, I was looking at how to lay out some of this stuff. And so maybe I would have said this at the beginning, but my next little part here is who were the Neoplatonists, not the ones influenced by them, but who were the actual ones.

And a lot of people consider Plotinus to be the founder of Neoplatonism. So he was around from around 204 to 270 AD. He developed its main ideas about what they called the One, which is a facsimile of God, but not really.

And also something that really hung around in the esoteric world, but had inroads into Christianity. And that is his idea is about the hierarchy of angelic beings. And of course, if you look at Valentinus, you get a big earful of that kind of stuff.

As you went for a lot of these guys, then the next fellow, he was a student of Plotinus, and his name was Porphyry, and he was around from about 234 to 305 AD. And he just helped to spread some of the Neoplatonic ideas and teachings.

Then one of the most important guys turns out, and I found videos about him, teachings about him, and just all kinds of folks who are influenced by him. That is a fellow named Iamblicus.

And he lived from around 245 to 325 AD. Now the important thing about Iamblicus, when you think about esoteric teachings, is he shifted Neoplatonus from an internal work of the divine spirit to an evocation of an angel's external to the body.

So not just, okay, God is working in or this sort of God. The One is working on me internally to perfect me. Now he wants to connect to angelic beings that are not with you or within you.

And so his major work was called, which influenced a lot of folks in that kind of arena, was on the mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaudyans, and Assyrians. And in this work, he talked about the process of the spiritual restoration towards perfection.

Then you get proclos, and he was around the year, quarter and 12 to 485 AD. And he was a Serian Neoplatonus, and he actually said that Plato's writings were completely and divinely inspired. So there you go.

him, and he turns out to be something that ends up rearing its ugly head later in different versions of apostasy. He was a universalist, and he was supposedly initiated into the Egyptian mystery religions that promised this sort of perfection and immortality, like the Neoplatanists, the other ones did.

And so again, does the Naur have its own take on perfectionism? Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started, or how the progression of modern Pentecostalism, transition through the latter reign, charismatic and other fringe movements into the new apostolic reformation?

You can learn this and more on William Brannum Historical Research's website, William-Brannum.org. On the book's page of the website, you can find the compiled research of John Collins, Charles Paisley, Stephen McCummery, John McKinnon and others, with links to the paper, audio and digital versions of each book.

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You know, you're talking about the one, and I want to pause there briefly because whenever I left the cult, I started studying all different kinds of things, Neoplatans of them being one of them.

And it was interesting because whenever you would find a belief set that was one of these mystery, divine mystery cults or however you want to call them, they all had some similar belief, the one, the Sophia, the different versions of what they consider to be their supreme truth.

And having been raised from birth in a mystery cult, you are somehow attracted to other mystery cults when you leave. And that's part of the reason that we have so many people that are re-victimized when they leave a cult.

And so early on in my research, I actually had to put it on pause because I would study things like this, the one, and then I would start to frame in my mind what I remembered of the mystery of God as it was being taught in my mystery cult to what was being taught in this mystery cult.

And interestingly enough, they fit like a glove. And so you're being taught falsely, a false version of Christianity in a mystery cult. When you leave, you get easily assimilated because they're so compatible. But the way it was taught, you mentioned that the spiritual purification was necessary.

Well, that's exactly how it wasn't laterane. It wasn't what Christ did for you. It was how you could conform. to the rules and become greater than the rest of the Christians, and therefore you would be the one to escape while the rest of the Christians burned as the earth was destroyed. That was the belief set. You had to have the spiritual purification, and you did not look for the Holy Spirit to make you pure. The ones who were in the most extreme cults, like Brannum, many others, A. Allen did the same kind of thing. They tried to get you to focus on them and their stage persona, as their means to

give you this mystery that you didn't otherwise have. As they were laying the mystery religion, they're teaching you the one philosophy, but it's a different flavor of the one. It is neoplatism, but then if you dive all the way down to the theology itself, neoplatism had this other belief, which you may actually be going heading there, but it taught that evil was essentially the complete absence of good. It wasn't described in biblical terms. It was like the Yen and the Yang. It was the Thor and the Loki. You had the absolute good, and you had the absolute evil. It's an absence of good

was evil. That's the same kind of thing that the faith healers brought forward. They were teaching faith as their God, and they called it the gospel of divine healing. The absence of that, the absence of your faith in this minister, was unbelief. One of the themes that came out of Brannumism was sin is unbelief. What is sin? It is unbelief. He continually said this. To make the people feel like if they did not believe in his stage presence that they were actually in sin, fast forward to the NAR. This is developed into the, you cannot question your leader mentality,

because if you question your sinning, that's how this grew and evolved. But in its essence, it is neoplatism. It's the serving the one, and it's a completely different version of a religion than anything that's biblical. Yeah, that's right, John. And three things that take this this idea further, or there were influenced by the neoplatonist Eomblichus come out really, really close to everything you're saying right there. And one of them, again, I've heard this from Wesley Swift and a lot of other folks. One of the ideas it was really influenced by Eomblichus was the idea of a pre-existent angelic sons of God that are divine and immortal.

After they become incarnate, they are trying to make their ways back. They're destined to return to their source known as the one. Then this is kind of my vernacular of what the one kind of comes up to be, and a lot of the writings. It's not really God. It's, uh, It's more like seen as an impersonal divine conglomerate, an infinite blob of primordial angelic stuff.

Okay, so the angelic realm, which they think is God is more like this, compacted version of all the spiritual elements, Valentinus would have called this the Pluroma, and that's where the Aons or the angelic beings resided.

Okay, and then a really big idea that comes from Neo-Platinus and is the in the nations from the one, and that recurs all over the place. And what they do is they tend to break down this impersonal so-called God into more manageable components.

So when somebody says they're their God must obey, I've heard that literally from a Nar prophet, they're spiritual rules and God must obey them. Well, they're kind of treating God and the same way that the Neo-Platinus did, as he's been broken down to more comfortable, manageable components, which a lot of times has to do with the angels.

And so this becomes something like a defined disaggregation. And without listening all of them that occurred, the Aons of the Pluroma, Valentinus is one. The great chain of spiritual being of alchemist is one.

And in Kabbalah, they refer to Jacob's ladder, they like that analogy. And then you go to Alice Baby and other New Age teachers and often you hear the spiritual hierarchy. When you're getting to laddering prophets influenced by Jane Lee, they often refer to us as the great cloud of witnesses.

And if you lay those side beside what the Neo-Platinus are talking about and what these other versions of the one are talking about, you really can't find too much difference. And that's why people have pointed that out, that those influenced by Jane Lee didn't the laddering, they might as well be spiritual alchemist or the Oplatinus.

And so I'm the enough though, if you get down to the NAR, I've been hearing this directly from NAR folk, but also from people that are analyzing NAR. And they start describing something that's actually also very cult-like and that is spiritual portals.

And I never get his last name right, but it's Francis Fregapana, I think. And so he's written about the spiritual portal-like ways to get in contact with angelic beings, Todd Bentley also. He's one of those guys who'd like to run inside there about a really tall angel.

So he... that one too. And then you've got Jennifer LeClaire, who you're teaching likewise, and then literally get Alistair Crowley talks about the same kind of stuff. Okay, so in all of these cases, God has either broken down into more manageable components that can be called down, communicated with, and commanded, or they actually take the next step, which is to channel or receive bodily these components.

And this helps you achieve perfection. Every time I hear somebody talking about the spiritual portals, I always think about the Lunitans cartoon, where they've got the portable holes, and they throw the portable holes out and some guy falls in it, because that's about how it is.

You don't know where you're gonna go when you fall into the portable hole, with their spiritual channeling, you don't know what demon you're gonna resurrect with one of these things. So it gets really weird and complicated, but in the end, you're right.

They've basically taken this idea that they are in control of the gods, and whenever they say, God, brand them said it too, I'm certain many other lanterns are in guys, did, but God is subject to your request when you speaking, and this really comes from the manifested suns of God idea.

They believe that they are more than human. They are miniature gods, and whenever they speak, they can command the Holy Spirit to do things. They can command Jesus or the Father to do things.

And in some flavors of it, they obviously had the oneness God, but whatever it was that they were channeling, it wasn't God that was doing these things, if they were even being realistic. But in the end, once I started studying the ancient cultures and ancient mythologies, I began to realize that the way that they were acting actually goes back far beyond what Plato even would have experienced.

They're acting in the ways in which the ancient kings and monarchs and pharaohs did, where they were the divine representation, they were literally the God in human form to their people, and people were being sacrificed to these gods.

That's how bad and evil and ridiculous this is, and to think that in today's day and age, people would say that they have the power to command God, and then also try to pretend to be Christian and claim that this isn't heresy.

And what world is that not heretical? Absolutely, it's pretty dumb-founding when you run into that. And it puts you in an unusual position because when you're with somebody who you assume, is a Christian saying a Bible study, and they start bringing up some of this stuff, I mean, what's the proper thing to do?

You repeat them and set them straight. You unfelish them, you know, like, unlike them. on the internet. I think you definitely pray for them and they're probably, they're probably as a time to speak out about it, which you and I are doing right here. But there's a time when you really run face to face with folks that have ideas like this and well, Jesus said that do not worry ahead of time what you will say because the real Holy Spirit will put those words in your mind and your heart and you'll speak those words. So, as always, I've got some

of stuff here, John, I hope I get through it as quickly as I can because it just really fascinated me, especially how this stuff with neoplatonus like eombicus has been filtered down to the day.

So, five beliefs that are implied by eombicus pantheism. The universe is broken. It must be made whole again so that God, aka the one, can once again be all and in all. Okay, so yeah, you're going to fix God, make God great again. It's really, but it boils down to you. Then another idea that is implied is universal reconciliation, which I alluded to a bit earlier. Due to the influence of neoplatonus and through Jane Lee, the latter-ranked prophet George Houghton and others say that all will be saved eventually. This is, however, tempered by the removal clause, if you can put it

that way, aka a sacred purge of the undefined, which I think you were talking about earlier. Another thing implied by all that this stuff from the eombicus, and I did hear you say something summer. The reconciliation of all opposites, this is just, you know, the occult world is replete with references to this sort of idea. And sometimes they spell it out for you, sometimes it lets you ponder. But I've seen this in writing, left and right, male and female, good and evil, heaven and earth, mortal and immortal, human and angelic, and literally with quite a few of the

first prized on Lucifer. So this reconciliation of all opposites is supposed to be something like Hagel's idea, you know, thesis, antithesis, joining together, producing something better than it was or greater. And then you have a very odd idea that's also implied by these teachings.

That is the restoration of all. So restoration is a word you hear a lot when you're analyzing the norm. But in these kinds of terms, this is to empty the spiritual realm of all so that they can be restored by reuniting with their earthly partners.

In other words, yeah, that goes back to the gnostic idea of the spiritual beings that were separated, and one of their halves went to be incarnated on earth, the other one is still residing in the heavenlies, and the consummation of all things at the end of time, they will be reunited, and this will make perfection or completion.

And this is actually the way to be made perfect with the help of angels. That I was talking about at the beginning. So a big one comes in there, and that is Theorgy. So what is Theorgy? I didn't really write down my source, but this is from a scholar.

The goal of the Theorgy is the deification of its participants, this one spirits inhabit a human being for the perfection or to disclose mysteries. So we get down to Jane Leigh again. Jane Leigh heard mentor John Portage and this concept of Theorgy.

Leigh said that we will have communion with the most holy beings who will willingly confer with us their watchers sent down from the heavens as ministering angels. I can see your fingers were twitching on that, because John, I know you've talked about that quite a bit, but it does get worse. Leigh said that spirits of light who will enter the bodily vehicles of holy souls to make them all godified as Christ. This is The goal of Theorgy. So like the neoplatonist before him, this guy, John Portage said, all of the angels are derived from the one, and collectively,

they are the fullness of God. That's like Valentinus's pluroma, because all angels are aspects of God. Yeah, that's just right down the pike from Calaba and Valentinus. Now we get to more like our current day folks, like the Nara prophets, and here's a few of the big ones, Winshaw, Bill Hammond, Ian Carroll, and Cindy Jacobs, and also again, like Aleister Crowley, notorious Satanist. Portage believed that all people have one such spirit watching over them.

I don't know if you're a fan of the Ghostbusters movies, the original ones back went back when they were good in the 80s. There was this notion that all of these demons were about to be released into the world, and they were trying to find ways to inhabit human bodies and escape and all of this stuff. If you really believe what all of these people are saying in these ministries, it's like they're playing out this real life Ghostbusters kind of movie, but instead of something to be the good guys that are putting them back in their demons back in the cages.

These are the people wanting to release them into the world. So it gets really, really weird. Not many people know this, but in the latarine movements and beyond. Branham was teaching people how he called his spirit guides.

And not many people know this because you can read like Karrismaniam, or what's that magazine called, Charisma Magazine. You can read all of these things about Branham's visions. And when you read it, in the way that they have polished it and tried to remove all of the occult from what Branham taught, they make you believe that he had a vision from God as is described in the Bible.

But that's not how Branham's visions came. Branham claimed that an angel is the one who revealed the vision to him. And he would always say, I have the angel in the platform with me, the angel does the healing not me.

He's the spirit guide that's with him. And in his manifested sons of God theology, he likened this spirit guide to what happened in the New Testament, but he changed the divinity of God to do so.

He said that Jesus was constrained and could not do anything until the Father showed him a vision that he could do it. And if you follow all of his theology out to its logical conclusion, the way that he described God was these angelic beings, these watchers, these things you're talking about.

So in his theology, literally, Jesus is having to have a divine angel coming down in the form from God from the throne and showing Jesus how to do things, oh, by the way, in the same way that he is doing them on the platform, William Branham.

And so they're calling down these demons from hell, if you really believe that they are doing what they say they do. And Branham was teaching all of these men how he was channeling. And he admits this on one single recording.

We don't have access to his private meetings where he's teaching them. But in one single recording, he says that he chants, that's how he brings down and summons his demon. And it sounds so stupid, thinking about it, but he says, and when I want to call down the spirit guide, he uses another word, he says, I start going one plus one equals two, two plus two equals four, two plus and he's getting in that rhythm and that beat.

And what he's describing is chanting and channeling. And when you consider what this is, and if you know the occult, this is not how you call the Holy Spirit. This is how you summon a demon.

This is what would have all the Ghostbusters come with their machinery and put them back in the cage, man. Yeah, and I feel like it's very true that the folks that are teaching these things are thoroughly slimy, they're followers.

And I think theory... is one of the major ways they sline people. So, just to show some of the folks from the Laterane, they were influenced by Jane Lee. Of course, she's 17th century mystic.

Laterane is approximately 1948, and influence in still our profits of today. So, back to this fellow royal crown quest. Well, this person who's done a lot of research and read her doctoral dissertation about the Laterane and related issues.

She's an ex-nar person, and her name is Dr. Bridget Jacobs. She told me that Jane Lee influenced Laterane's profit, crown quest, was essentially a neoplatonist. I said, huh, they kind of perked up my ears.

So, I said, well, let's see if that's true because even though she's got a doctorate, I like to check things out from herself. Maybe I'll see something slightly different. So, here's what a crown quest said in one of his pistols from the kingdom.

He said that all spirit beings were originally co-mingled and blended together as one, and he capitalizes one. Yeah, it sounds kind of like that's neoplatonist. As far as calling them down, he also had for perfection, which is where we kind of begin this whole thing.

He says, we, that's capitalized, we, the cloud of witnesses, will take up our capitalized abode and tabernacle within you. Now, the strangest of abode, pick up our abode, sounds really similar to not only Jane Lee, but all the way back to Valentinus, that part about the bridegroomed spirits and the bride, the bridal chamber, where these spirits will take up their abode.

Then he says something really out and out that, yes, sounds like what you're describing about random. A crown quest says, we will fully incarnate ourselves within your souls and bodies. And why does he say that?

He's apparently speaking to charismatic Christians who may not normally talk like this or think like this. But he's answering the question of, how do we really become perfect? There's so much about becoming sanctified, glorified, be likewise perfect as your father's perfect.

And so he says, this is the path to perfection, is to call down somebody apparently in the cloud of witnesses and tell them to take abode and tabernacle within. It's also a use of that, that feast of tabernacles, the lettering, George Warnark wrote about.

as the third experience of God. You got born again, you got baptized in the Holy Spirit, and then something as yet has not occurred, which is perfection, is the feast of tabernacles, and this is what Crown, Christian, and others have interpreted that to me. So here's another or two. George Halton again, he says the perfection of all saints, the ages before, depends on those who are now coming to perfection. Interesting. So we talked about that once, about the great weight on people's shoulders. It's not really the take-up on your shoulders, my yoke, prime humble, and you'll find peace for your souls. It's more like take-up on the fate

of all of the saints from previous years, including those alive today, that you are going to bring them into perfection. Do you usually think about this like a symbiotic relationship, where both sides are getting some sort of benefit from it? The folks on earth are getting their glorification, and likewise, the folks in this spiritual realm are gaining theirs at the same time.

And so another guy influenced by Leeds said, it is only through us, and that's all caps, who we've seen that kind of stuff in tweets occasionally, is only through us that the departed spirit from beyond the veil, that's like the way they talk, will be made perfect.

And so what is this even matter for today? Well, that brings us to the NARV and Theorgy. So you mentioned the magazine Charisma. Well, Jennifer Leclerc is the senior editor of Charisma, and she recently wrote an article titled, What You Need to Know About Angelic Watchers.

She says that Angelic Watchers are roaming the earth, doesn't sound really like you'd want to meet one if they're roaming the earth, and they're waiting for an assignment. I think there was an early text in lettering writings, Angels on Assignment, something like that. But I would think if they're roaming the earth to get their assignments from who? From me or you, John? I mean, let's you know, somewhere somebody's got to get some sense about this stuff. So, but there's further issues related to this. Dutch Sheets, another NARV related guy says, he says, he was told to take

a team to Valley Forge, because angels were reserved there, and they need to be released.

Paula White is Mr. Trump's senior advisor of White House Faith Office. She says, if you pay her $1,000, you will receive her personal angel. Now, yes, you left. On that one, I would really refer Mrs. White to Martin Luther.

And one of the big reasons he talked about the sale of indulgences, if that doesn't really ring a bell with the listeners, you can Google that. Martin Luther's sale of indulgences, and you'll see how strong he felt about this, enough so that he was excommunicated from the Catholic Church.

And I mean, it's a long story, but for me, he's one of the heroes of the faith, even though he's not perfect by any means. Mrs. White says, she has had several angelic presentations from angels who have ministered to her.

And she says, this is one of the ways that God speaks to us. So that whole thing, God told me, I don't know that I'd be waiting on an angel to appear and speak to me, because like you said, John, you can begin to make up stuff in your own head and assume, unrightly, that God's speaking to you or the Spirit.

Okay, back to Holly Pivic in June 9, 2022. She wrote a nice article, well done, called NAR extremism, Colin. Why don't leading apostles call it out? And she says that this NAR leader, Carol, is not the only one who has promoted the practice.

Of talking with dead believers or claiming to court release and commission angels, according to Pivic. And she's very balanced. She doesn't come out and paint with a broad brush. She's a very balanced teacher.

She says that this has actually become rather widespread. And what she talks about is that it's gone beyond the lines between charismatic Pentecostal on into denominational ideas of seeking the Lord through angels and waiting for their communications.

So Carol says that the God can communicate with us through those who have gone on before and are not living with him. Bill Hammond, one of the favorites, of course, of all this kind of stuff, says that we must call the host of war angels to come and appoint themselves companions.

Again, it sounds very reminiscent of Valentines and others companions in the spiritual hierarchy. The elite must, according to the and Mr. Hammond accept them, we do. Maybe I'm not one of the elite, if I have to accept one of these angels and make them my companion.

Oh yeah, yeah, the companion where that comes from, Jane Leade, directly and directly, I don't know. And finally, Cindy Jacobs has this kind of question

to tickle the ears of folks that read her books. She says, what do you think about God having a guardian angel assigned just for you? Well, the funny part about this is, I can tell you how to achieve perfection in the way that these mystery cults can't.

And I won't charge you $1,000 for it. Oh, Jesus openly said the Bible, the law and the prophets were summed up in these two things. Love God above all else and love your neighbor as yourself.

And you can walk through the New Testament and you can see all these passages about putting on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And if you love one another, God abines it in us and his love is perfected in us, it's not about war, it's about love.

And that's where you can see the real imbalance of this thing. They're teaching something that defies the laws of love. Yeah, John, it's really good to hear that positive conclusion. I have something here that I would call food from thought and it wouldn't go against the positive applications for what you said.

It's, I express it pretty much in an if then. And this is just speculation and take it for whatever. But the question really is, what are the implications of mixing perfection through contact with angels and universal restoration?

You would see there are sort of separate ideas. But if perfection comes through union with angels and it is mixed with the idea of universal restoration, then what does it mean when Zane Leed says that all apostasy souls, Lucifer and his angels will descend to be restored through union with chosen vessels?

Now that's a big earful, but if you push pause and think about that or late to this, like another promotion of my book, which John has already done very nicely, but I go into that a little bit more.

It's a difficult question and it's just at the level of implications. And to follow that up, if universal restoration is to convert the entire world, I eat the billion, I was about to say the billion dollar, and that's the billion so revival, something along those lines.

And if this universal restorations to happen before, the literal individual return of the person, Jesus Christ, then whose kingdom would it be? What can tell you what kingdom it sounds like? And it sounds an awful lot like one of these Ghostbusters movies.

There's so many all of these demons, and I just, I really want to get one of those things that shoots the beam of light and whatever those things are called, I'm going to blame, but it's so absurd.

What it becomes, you know, after you are able to deprogram from it and take a step back, it's like an adult's version of a Dungeons & Dragons game. That's really all this is, and all of these adults are got into the hype of it, and I'll admit it's fun to play a game, but whenever you're talking about this, this is in a church setting, when you're talking about playing games like this in church, it's just, it has no place, it's not right, what the people are doing, so thank you for helping expose the apostasy.

You got it John. If you've enjoyed a show and you want more information, you can check us out on the web, you can find us at William-Branum.org. For more about the dark side of the New Apostolic Reformation, you can read Weaponized Religion, from Christian Identity to the NAR, and for more about the Converging Apostasy, you can read the book The Converging Apostasy, and also a quick outline of Hands-On Eschatology, a matter of timing and agency.

The Converging Apostasy. The Converging Apostasy.