Cultish - William Branham's End Times Visions & The Serpent Seed, Pt. 4

I told you the other day they're taking analysis there of the schools in Arizona where I live and 80 percent of the children in school is mentally retarded.

What will their children be? We can't have another generation. We're at the end.

All right. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to Cultish, Entering the Kingdom of the Cults. My name is Jeremiah Roberts, one of the co -hosts here.

As always, I'm with Andrew, super sleuth of the show. Good to have you back, man. We are both once again just having our minds blown by really, you think about this, like you think about right now we're in the time of cancel culture, right, where all of a sudden like you'll dig up someone's old tweets from 10 years ago and there's all the outrage and they have to publicly apologize at the altar of wokeness and all that sort of stuff.

And you can imagine, man, if William Branham had a Twitter, if he tweeted that, this is something that, you know, if you're a politician, it's your career, you're done.

You're done. I just want to say for the record, I did not go to school in Arizona. I don't know about you guys.

Oh, man, I totally did. I did, too. So I was like, oh, man. Yeah. So anyways, we are here with John Collins.

It's good to have you back, my friend. And as always, and you just just tell everyone real quickly, just at the beginning, just tell them whether they can find you because someone might have jumped in to this third podcast, not realizing this is the fourth podcast.

Yeah, fourth. So, yeah, fourth time is the charm or whatever you want to call it. But just real quickly, where can people find you in case they haven't checked you out already?

You find all of my research on William -Branham .org. You can also find me on Amazon and the book

Preacher Behind the White Hoods, a critical examination of William Branham and his message, and also on alternative considerations of Jonestown and People's Temple in the newsletter section.

Excellent. Excellent. Well, again, we appreciate you coming on. And what fascinated me about that clip, because we're kind of jumping in to now the

Chicago State Fair, the continued influences of Congressman, well, Roy Davis primarily, and some other interesting folks as well, too.

But the involvement of the different connections that William Branham had, but also how that affected his theology, because that is something that was something that's continually evolving.

And I found that beginning, quote, ironic, just because I think of the words of Jesus, suffering out the little children for such is the kingdom of heaven.

And here is someone who's saying quite the opposite. So you think, and especially,

I just, it's kind of baffling just because just hearing that someone say something like that.

So, but anyhow, so just bring us back into the historical nature of the

Chicago State Fair. Do you know any historical aspects of it? I know there's something large and historical.

How many people typically attended it? And by the time William Branham had went to it, which was a huge catalyst for his ministry and movement, like how long had the fair been going on for?

The fair, if I remember correctly, opened up, I think it was 1933, possibly middle of 1932.

And it went through to 1934, October 31st, 1934 is whenever the fair was ended.

It was a world's fair, people from all over the world came to it. I want to say that the number of visitors was somewhere like 48 million people, if I remember correctly, a lot of people going to this world's fair from all over the world.

Wow, it's incredibly fascinating. And so from the Chicago State Fair, just bring us into what attracted

William Branham to the Chicago State Fair and who did he get connected to?

And yeah, just bring us into that. Yeah, so the entire research in the world's fair was something that kind of took me by surprise.

I really didn't expect it was going to take me to Chicago, again, after we had just left

Chicago with all of the liquor, et cetera. But William Branham claimed that he allegedly had these seven visions in 1933.

And whenever I came across Roy Davis, the history of Roy Davis in Jeffersonville, and I found that William Branham was not in his own church, as he claimed in 1933, he was with Roy Davis, and that the two were going around, you know, doing evangelism, trying to train people about drinking poison, et cetera.

I'm starting to realize that these two were, you know, traveling a lot farther than I realized.

And it wasn't under the auspices of a Indiana preacher who became a prophet.

And I came across a quote where he mentions being at the Century of Progress and mentions hearing different religious speakers.

So I started, you know, digging into the Century of Progress World's Fair and trying to understand what this is, why are there religious speakers there?

And sure enough, there was a whole section outside of the World's Fair where these fundamentalist preachers were preaching, you know, fire and brimstone against the progress that was coming to the nation.

And it kind of fell into place because here you've got a, you know, cult leader who's claiming that the end of the world is coming.

And he met, you know, all of these different ministers who met at the Chicago World's Fair, many of which had the same idea, not all of them, but there would have been a lot of influence from what

I can tell on this World's Fair. It's very interesting to me too, because during this time where the

World's Fair is in Chicago, this is like the height of the Great Depression, right? So people are almost looking towards this

World's Fair as like something to look forward to because people have lost everything at this time.

Right. And so in the formulation of William Branham with some of his prophecies, is it okay to think that since there's these preachers preaching this fire and brimstone, this technology, this is the sign of the end times.

Was that like some of the way that Branham may have been thinking about using some of these inventions or things at the

World's Fair to shape out a prophecy of the end times or something like that?

You know, it's really hard to say. It wasn't until deep into my research, I started realizing that I grew up in this, trained to believe that he was a prophet who had seven prophecies in the year 1933 at his church.

And it's the church where my grandfather preached for over, you know, almost 50 years of his life.

Wow. When you walk to the building of the church, you see this big concrete inset,

I've got a picture of it somewhere that says dedicated in 1933. And according to my grandfather and several men who attended this church,

William Branham buried a list, a piece of paper with a list of his seven prophecies in the cornerstone of this church, right under this concrete inset.

And the biggest shock to me came when I saw the deed to the building was 1936.

You know, things just really didn't add up. And somewhere, I've got to find it for my website,

I've somewhere got a video clip of this guy who, it's the only documented testimony that I can find.

My grandfather claimed this all the time. When William Branham died, they actually dug up this cornerstone in the building because he's supposed to have these prophecies in it.

Right. And they found it was empty. There was no prophecies in it. And somewhere on the internet, you can find it on YouTube.

I'm going to try to find a clip from my website. This guy's describing his experience. Now, he's fully programmed in this cult, right?

He's describing what he felt whenever he saw that the cornerstone had nothing in it.

And he says something to the effect that, you know, the angels came down because they wouldn't let people see that blessed piece of paper.

And the angels came down and took it before they could get it out of the cornerstone. Wow. So, yeah.

So part of me grew up thinking that he had these prophecies and that he always claimed to have had these prophecies.

But one of the things I had to do to understand what this thing was that I was in was

I created this big, massive timeline of when did specific doctrines come in?

When did one stage persona end? When did a new stage persona begin? What changed in the stage personas?

And the earliest mention of these alleged 1933 prophecies was in the year 1953, and it was late in the year 1953.

So I don't know that he went going to the World's Fair, going to try to find things for a prophetic gift.

It appears that he claimed to have had a prophecy long after the fact, long after any of the prophecies actually were predicted and long after they even occurred.

He's claiming that he had prophecies on things that already happened. So the first historical documentation we can have of him talking about these prophecies is 1953.

About 1933 prophecies. I am only aware of one or two different prophecies that he had that he claimed to have had before they actually happened.

All of them that I'm aware of, except for these two, happened after the event. And the two that he claimed did not happen.

One of them is that California would sink before his son was an old man. His son is, you know, he's born in 19, what was it, 1934,

I think it was. So he's long past being an old man, and California is still there.

Right. Wow. Yeah. And so then that's interesting to see how that all started. So maybe,

I just thought about this, because we're kind of scrolling through different aspects, trying to give people a brief overview of this timeline. In chapter 10 of your book, you talk about William Branham's award -winning music band.

And I couldn't help but smile, because the first thing I thought of is in one of our previous conversations, in one of the earlier episodes, we were talking about the

Music Man, and how that reminded you of William Branham. So yeah,

I'm just kind of interested to see, like chronologically wise, can you kind of bring us just into a little bit about that, and what that really meant for William Branham, or what was the whole meaning behind this music band?

And it was an award, is it William Branham's award -winning music band? Can you just give us a brief overview of that as well, if that's possible?

That was extremely surprising to me. So I'll give you a little personal history on myself.

Yeah. I grew up with, my grandfather was the pastor of William Branham's church, and he was basically one of William Branham's deacons and right -hand men.

My maternal grandfather came from the state of Georgia. And if anyone who understands the

William Branham cult realizes that there is no unified cult, it is basically a group of subcults.

The people in one specific region are completely different than the people in a different region, believe different things, different ideologies.

And in any of the major cities where there's more than one sect of the cult, or more than one cult church, they won't even fellowship with each other, because they're so polarized against each other.

I grew up in this torn, weird atmosphere. I'm a musician, have been all my life.

My maternal grandfather, he gave me my first guitar.

He and his family, they play guitars, they love guitars. I love guitars. My paternal grandfather allegedly was told by William Branham that the guitars were of the devil, as were any stringed instrument.

So I had one side of my family who loved guitars and wanted me to have one.

I had the other side of the family who didn't, and I somehow managed to get one.

I'll never understand why my dad allowed it, but then he fought to get it back out the whole rest of my life.

So when I stumbled on William Branham's award -winning music band, and I see this whole lineup of instruments, it reminded me, when

I moved, I moved all across the country growing up, when I moved back to the state of Indiana, and I'm in this sect that the guitars are evil, for a period of time we had to live in my aunt's basement.

And when we're moving in, I'm carrying my guitar, and my aunt, I remember saying, John, you have a guitar?

And I just looked at her, I went down to the basement, I put it down, went back to my car, I brought in my electric guitar.

John, you have two guitars? Went back out, came back in with my mandolin. You have three guitars?

And I looked at my aunt and said, you know, I can keep doing this for a while if you want to do it. I have all the music, and when you watch my videos,

I'm playing all the music in the videos, I do the background music, I have several instruments, right?

So I see this photograph of William Branham and his, you know, this band that played in his church,

I had to know more. So I started digging through newspapers, and it was really hard to find, what could

I find about this? And I found out that the original church, you know, long before the stage persona that my family agreed with existed, the original church had a band, had different singers from different churches would even come, and they would basically lead the singing in William Branham's church, and they had a choir, and the choir would go around from city to city, and they had contests.

So this church was filled with singers, filled with music. Now, that's in comparison, in contrast, to my grandfather.

In his services, only the piano was allowed, only the organ, and the music had to be extremely slow.

I can remember there was a, there's a gathering where people from the south came, you know, from the different sects that played the guitars and the drums, and they come into this very slow music, and they're singing,

I'll fly away, oh, as slow as they could possibly sing it, right?

And these guys were like, come on, man, go faster, and they tried to clap it. All of this is going through my head, and I see this award -winning band, and it just made me start digging, what was this early church like?

I found they had a baseball team, when most cult churches that I grew up with would, some of them didn't even play sports.

They had a choir. Yeah, exactly, man. They had a choir.

They had this guy that was, he was a well -known singer for several different churches,

Catholic churches, Methodist churches. He would come lead the singing, and yeah, it was just a totally different church.

Yeah, that's fascinating, just to kind of see the infrastructure from there. Dean, did you have any thoughts?

So that church, the William Branham's award -winning band, was that William Branham's church, or was that a different church?

That was, yeah, that was partial, part of it was, part of the history in that book is in the church whenever it was

Davis's church, and then there was another part, you know, when William Branham basically took over Davis's congregation.

I refer to them one as the same, because it actually is the same church. Right, exactly. But there's a period of time when

Davis led it, and there's a period of time when William Branham took it over. Gotcha, so there was like an evolution of William Branham's theology in terms, or doctrine in terms of viewing music, like it starts off with this awesome, you know, music, and even sports, and things of that nature, and then over time it devolved into more of like a controlling type of atmosphere?

Possibly, I have my questions as to whether that actually was said to my grandfather or not,

I don't know, I wasn't there, but it's really odd to me that you have all of these different churches, many of which

William Branham went to, some of them have music, some of them don't, some of them frown on fast music, some of them don't, and it's just, you know, it really,

I think it depends more on the person that he appointed to lead it, what was their personality, and did they like music?

Right, yeah, when the standard's no longer the word of God, and then the prophet's gone, it's going to be up to the leader of that specific sect, that makes sense, yeah.

Yeah, and in the book too, John, you mentioned that in the same chapter you're talking about the award -winning music band,

Up Pops, our favorite Snidely Whiplash character, Roy Davis, and the

Ku Klux Klan, and I'm just trying to make sense of it, so somehow they were intermixed or they used the music as well, kind of like recruiting,

I know a lot of times you think about those old pictures or videos or just depictions, what was the,

I'm trying to think of the Tim Burton remake of Dumbo, right, where it's like at the circus and you have the marching band that's sort of doing the presentation of something, is that how that's connected?

I'm just trying to put together the pieces of what you wrote in the book, like how does it all fit together? Well, to be honest, that entire chapter was just because I found it so fascinating that it conflicted with everything that I knew growing up.

Ah, yeah, gotcha. Trying to tie it to the larger story is actually really difficult to tie that to the story because that has no place in the larger story, right?

Right. But the interesting thing is what you mentioned was actually going through my head.

So Roy Davis is in Jeffersonville, he's obviously trying to build another clan, we find that out much later in the book.

He's got William Branham who's leading this church, he's appointed other elders of the church who became part of William Branham's following who had doctrines like the

Christian identity William Branham calls it the serpent seed. So he's basically forming his doctrinal platform.

He's also forming the structure of the church which had the music, the ballgames. It was every town that I traced

Davis through from Georgia in the early 1920s all the way through Tennessee into Louisville, Kentucky into Jeffersonville.

Davis tried to have a very strong public presence, one that he just thrived on the publicity.

He liked people to like him. Davis himself was a musician, his brothers were musicians.

When they came and they planted that church, his brothers came from the state of Texas to help him do it and they came with a band singing, people joining together for worship services, etc.

So music was a big part of the church and a big part of what Davis was doing. Interestingly in that era you also had the woman's clan and according at least according to the newspapers

Davis was a big womanizer. So you had in Jeffersonville the knights of the

Ku Klux Klan, men's division, knights of the Ku Klux Klan, women's division. There's a name for them,

I can't remember what they called them. My history is right, there's probably some history buff that's going to just give me flack for even asking this question, but I'm just trying to think historical timelines.

I just think because you mentioned the fact that there's women, there's clans women, isn't this during the time where women can't vote?

Do you have the 1920s or did that already take place? Did they already get the rights to vote? You know

I'd have to look it up, I can't remember my timeline either. I'm just curious, I'm just thinking in regards to women being involved in something that's indicative of a time of discrimination.

When was it? It looks like it was passed by Congress on June 4th 1919 and ratified on August 18th 1920.

The 19th amendment granted women the right to vote. Well that's crazy because if you think about that that's really around the exact time frame or I think we're in the later 1920s or around this sort of time frame.

This is right when women just finally got their rights to vote. They're now getting some level of equality, but here's a whole section of women that have their clans women and they're acting in such a way that's incredibly discriminatory.

I don't know, I just thought that ironic. Remember my opinion is that this was a political cult, not a religious cult.

They were a political cult with a religious front. Women of this cult still today are not permitted to vote.

When we left the cult, I remember this was a big event. My wife and I together, we went to vote for the first time.

It was her first time to vote together. She wasn't allowed to in the cult and so the women's suffrage did end in 1920 apparently, but not for this group because William Branham, the political agenda did not permit it.

So again, you're speaking from your experience and cults can evolve very quickly over a short amount of time as well for sure, but just jumping forward modern day today to the best of your knowledge, do women still not vote at least in the message of Branhamites or just in some subsections of that or what does that look like today?

We escaped January 1st, 2012 was when we made our escape and that next election,

I can't remember what year that was. That's the first time my wife was ever allowed to vote. Wow. So that's still today, yes.

Wow. That's incredible. Yeah. I think that 2012, that might've been, was that Obama versus Romney, I think?

Yeah. Yeah. I think so. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Yeah. But that's still, I can imagine what that must've been like.

I mean, there's so many other instances of sort of the isolation, whether it's physically, sociologically, and it was just interesting too, that in the chapter, in that chapter on the state fair, there's a time where William Branham was speaking out against Hollywood and some of the modern day actors and actresses of their time, because how they were dressing in comparison to the holiness code.

And we've had people from the UPCI with the long dresses or the long hair and such. I found that interesting as well too.

So maybe we could jump into some of the theology, just a little bit of the theology or some of the prophecies as well too, because this is some of the things that formulated out of his connections at the

Chicago state fair. What would be some examples of just a brief overview?

What would be the most significant prophecies that he gave given the influences that he had at the state fair?

Sorry, it's been a long day. Well, let's take a step back.

So William Branham is known for allegedly having seven prophecies in the year of 1933.

And the reason I want to step back is because if you read any historian on William Branham who's basically writing about William Branham's theology and why is he considered a prophet, they go into these seven prophecies of 1933 that were allegedly buried in the cornerstone of this building that was deeded in 1936.

The piece of paper that they tried to dig up that my grandfather and the other witnesses saw did not exist in this cornerstone.

Another version of William Branham's stage persona appeared to be reading from this paper that's supposed to be buried in the cornerstone.

And he says, let me read you something. I've got written here 1932.

So that doesn't work with the 1933 version of the stage persona. Whenever I started digging into this, there were much more than seven prophecies.

It really depends on which version of the stage persona that you're referring to. So you asked me what prophecies came out of the world's fair.

Well, it depends on number one, which world's fair and number two, which version of the stage persona are you referring to?

The list of seven prophecies that most historians credit

William Branham for having in 1932, or 1933, I should say.

The first one is that William Branham claims to have predicted that Roosevelt, although other versions of a stage persona says

Hitler, would lead America into a second world war. Number two is that Mussolini would invade

Ethiopia and that would be his last invasion. Other versions of a stage persona doesn't know if it'd be the last invasion.

He doesn't know which one is going to win, according to his alleged 1933 prophecy.

He also claimed to have predicted that the Maginot or the Siegfried line would be built depending on which version of the prophecy, or in this case, probably which version of his memory.

He couldn't remember which defensive line had been built in his prophecies.

The one that is remembered of the seven that relates to the 1933 world's fair is that cars would become shaped like an egg.

It's interesting because that prophecy in some versions of a stage persona is just simply, it's going to be an egg -shaped car.

But after he goes to the, I think it's the Seattle world's fair, and he starts seeing the later technologies, this egg -shaped car suddenly is given automatic guidance systems.

There's a photograph on my website that you can find, but he says,

I've got this vision of this woman and this man who are sitting in, they're playing a game like checkers with their family and some other forces controlling the steering wheel.

Well, this photo actually exists. It was distributed in newspapers before he even changed the prophecy to this claim.

So that's number four. Number five, he predicted that the

United States would be ruled by a woman in some version of the stage persona. Some versions claimed it was

President Kennedy, and other versions claimed it was the Catholic church. Number six, he claimed that there would be a progression of decay of the morality of women.

And number seven was the doomsday prediction. He claims to have predicted that the world would end.

And he had written in his paper, I believe all of these things will happen before the year 1977. Yeah.

And in the doomsday prediction, specifically the seventh prophecy, is that where you talked about nuclear fall happening in the

Midwest? Not specifically. When William Branham gives his lineup of prophecy, again, they change dramatically.

For instance, there's another version of the prophecies where he claims that God told him don't eat eggs in the last days.

That's one of the 1933 prophecies. Although my family grew up with his family, and I can assure you that they did eat eggs.

Also predicted don't live in a valley in the last days. Well, if you know Jeffersonville, Indiana and Louisville, Kentucky, we're in the

Ohio River Valley still today, the church is in the Ohio River Valley. But that was one of the 1933 prophecies, right?

He usually gives us a lineup of all. He always claims there's seven, even though they vary.

But the details come within different predictions or prophecies or a lot of times just rambling.

But in one of his ramblings, he claims that he has studied and determined that when the

Soviet Union attacks the United States, they're going to drop the bomb right here in Jeffersonville. And I'll be honest, you know, growing up, that scared me.

Well, why are we staying here? Right? Yeah. Well, he it really depends on his audience, right?

If he's speaking to this group of people in this geographical region, your region is the one that's going to be doomed.

And then he goes to the next region. Your region also is going to be the one to be doomed. The most interesting of all of the weird doomsday predictions is there comes a point whenever he's so he's spread out so far and so many people are be doomed.

He just claims that there's going to be a tidal wave from the West Coast that's going to go all the way across the

East Coast and just demolish everything. Wow. So so quick question for you. The 1977 date.

So what does what do they you know, how do they justify him being a true prophet now since 1977 is come and gone?

Like what? How does how does that work out? I hear there's variations for other prophecies, but I don't know.

Is there a variation for that one or was it like a like a how do they how they justify that?

Well, what's the best way? So I'm going to explain this using covid, right?

Yeah. Covid hit the United States. We have vaccines, we're vaccinated and it's working great.

Same vaccines are going across the world and it's working great in other parts of the world. South Africa, you have the

South African variant. You've got the same vaccines, the same covid everything.

But you have a different region of people that it you know, the virus mutates in different ways.

And that vaccine is effective so long as that variant isn't more power, isn't more adaptive than the vaccine.

Once it goes beyond the vaccine and that variant comes in the United States, we have problem in this cult.

This cult, again, is not a unified cult. It is basically a cult of sub cults, each one having different versions of cognitive dissonance.

And it really depends on how that particular sect has progressed over time, how that cognitive dissonance has affected them in the years leading up to 1977.

They there's actually on my website, you can find this pamphlet that they passed out. It's called by 1977.

And it's a collection of every single prediction that William Branham had stating that 1977 was the doomsday year.

And they're everything from William Branham, outright saying that by divine inspiration is going to be there in 1977.

You and I understand divine inspiration with a prediction means a prophecy.

Some variations of the sect due to their cognitive dissonance, they try to separate the prediction from prophesy and basically say no, it's just a prediction.

Oh, wow. Some of the statements that William Branham made, depending on the group, the audience that he was in, he would say things like, now you watch, they're going to say

I prophesied 1977. I'm saying this by divine inspiration that I do not prophesy.

He says, my favorite quote on the subject, he says, the Bible says that no man knows the hour, but it doesn't say that you don't know the year.

Wow. Wow. It's, it's, it's ridiculous when you think about it. So they, they passed out this pamphlet.

The cult erased this whole history. You, you can't find this for sale in their bookshelf.

Surprisingly. I actually managed to get a copy of it, but after 1977, each group basically grew in a different way.

But you'll see some people who say that God paused time and you've got the people who say, no, it wasn't a prophecy.

And you've got the other people who argue with those people saying, well, yes, it was a prophecy. It was divine inspiration, but God paused time because we couldn't, we didn't have every last person in who was going to be

Whoa. Okay. Interesting. It's almost reminds me because just two years prior you had the end of the world prediction, 1975 from the watchtower

Bible and track society. And they tried to re -explain it that somehow Christ returned invisibly.

Um, and, and to try and explain that away. In fact, John, I'm just looking at the quarter now,

Andrew pulled up and it says, um, he said, I said, quote, just before the time comes that automobiles, which were built, which was built that old straight back 20 years or 25 years ago, you'll remember 20 years.

Anyhow, that I said, there'll be, look, they'll look like an egg. They'll be shaped that that's a vision be something on, be something on the shape, something like that, but that's the way they'll be right before the rapture.

And, you know, I'm just, this is the 1977, uh, track.

Yeah. Which I'm just trying to think, are there anything, I mean, we've got the Tesla's now they're kind of the futuristic cars, but there's not any egg shaped

Teslas. We've got that weird polygon Tesla truck. There's the bugs. Well, it doesn't, it doesn't work, right?

I mean, think about an egg. Where are you going to put the wheels? How the thing is ridiculously complicated.

So the 1933 world's fair, there was this vehicle that's called the Dymaxion that was this, it literally was an egg and it had three wheels and they gave it a few test runs, but the thing exploded because it flipped over.

Um, the, the egg is not an aerodynamic shape. It's gotta be flatter for it to be aerodynamic. And so you get going too fast and it takes a corner.

Well, the whole thing is going to roll like an egg. So it, it will never, this is one prediction that I predict will never ever happen anyway because it can't, it doesn't, it doesn't match the aerodynamics.

If, if you study aerodynamics in the slightest, it doesn't match. The only thing that remotely kind of resembles like an egg shaped, if you, if you think about it,

I mean, it's got this, it's got the giant thing on top of the, uh, the Oscar Wiener mobile. That's the only thing

I could possibly think of. I thought of anything as like egg shapes. It's kind of wide. It kind of looks like what you, how do you pronounce that?

Dimexion. The Oscar Wiener mobile, that's kind of Dimexion, right? Yeah, I guess so. You're too much, bro.

They look more like an Airstream trailer, but this is like, this is a three wheeled vehicle that just, according to physics, it just doesn't make sense.

Yeah. I would not want to drive around on a freeway with a three wheeled vehicle. Well, and what's funny is there was a period of time when this, in 1933, had he actually prophesied it in 1933, people would have said, well, what are you talking about?

I just read that in the newspaper. This was all across the world. People were, scientists were predicting that cars were going to go through a transformation and that they had determined that the egg was faster than the boxy cars.

Gotcha. So there was this big scientific movement. I think that earliest date that I came across,

I want to say it was like 1915 or it was long before 1933.

I'll put it like that. But I found even in the Louisville newspaper, which is printed and distributed in Jeffersonville, where William Branham was before 1933, was describing the upcoming egg shaped cars.

It makes sense. It's playing on people's ignorance in a sense, even in terms of some of his prophecies of like fascism, communism, all of these things ruling before the end.

I mean, you can go look at books like 1984 or other books that were written at certain times, making predictions of what the future is going to look like in terms of like a dystopian setting in a world you wouldn't want to live in where the state is

God. So I can understand even using fascism, communism, all of those things.

This is kind of like a leg up on having a prophetic voice or vision of the future.

It's kind of like the spirit of the age at that time. This is what was going on. Well, and there's different versions.

So his prophecies were never all -inclusive. He would never... You guys have read the

Bible, right? You understand that whenever a prophet spoke, they wrote it down because they wanted to confirm that what he said actually is...

What happened is actually what he said. Because if it wasn't down to the letter of what he actually said, this was a false prophet.

Don't listen to him. This is not one of the good guys, basically. Well, with William Branham, he doesn't give all the details like any charlatan.

He doesn't give all the details because if he gives too much, people are going to figure out, well, wait a minute, this didn't quite happen like this.

So even with his end -of -the -world prophecies, with different groups of people across the

United States, he would tell this group one specific detail that got them all excited and up in air because the world's ending.

And this other group on this other side would have something totally different. A good example, there was this guy that had a...

Wealthy guy, had a lot of money. William Branham claimed that before the end of the world came, he was going to have one final tent revival coast to coast.

And back when he said it, and back whenever there are tent revivals, you can probably picture this happening.

So this guy did, and William Branham told him that exactly how it was going to happen.

I've envisioned that there's going to be this plane that's going to carry me from town to town. We'll land in the open field and we'll set up the tent.

So this guy actually goes out and he buys this plane to fly William Branham around. William Branham's dead and this plane was still being held for William Branham's tent revivals.

Now, I just went outside. We went out to eat right before this call and it was so crazy hot in my truck.

I couldn't wait for the air conditioner to come on. By the time we got to the restaurant, I was still sweating.

And I'm, you know, I'm not going to go sit in a tent in this heat. I can assure you that most of this town, most of the, most of the quote unquote elect aren't going to want to go sit in this heat.

They're going to say, Hey, William Branham, if you were alive today, can't you just get this auditorium for me instead?

So this one guy in this one town, he has the airplane. This other guy has like a bus or something.

There's a vision of a bus and they're all totally different. I had, I've had followers tell me, former members of the cult tell me that they grew up, this was a woman told me this.

She said it was a curse to be beautiful because William Branham claimed that Russians were going to storm the

United States and they were going to rape all the beautiful women. And I, she, you know, she was, she was pleasant to look at.

And I could see that, you know, this woman was really, really scared growing up because God, God gave her beauty and she was wanting to try not to be beautiful because she didn't want to be raped when it happened.

Oh my goodness. Wow. That's, yeah, that's spiritual abuse for sure. Wow. Yeah.

So at this point, I mean, there, there's other things that, that evolved into, you have the, you have the ideas of the different, the different prophecies and how that evolved.

And well, there's also so much to unravel. And also we're going to talk about some of his theology, but one of the things

I'm just curious about in the same chapter in which you described the marching band, where like later on was, was, well, actually it was later on one of the actual chapters, excuse me, but it was the doctrine of the serpent seed, which was the notion that the, and it's interesting too, because there's a version of this within the church of Israel when we had the, yeah, the white supremacist church that we were previously dealing with one of our previous episodes, but the serpent seed doctrine, which basically it's the notion that original sin in the garden of Eden was not a result of eating fruit.

As the Bible narrative describes, according to the prophet Eve, the mother of all living had just, if you have women, if you have children around just so you know, if you have sensitive ears, this is explicit.

Earmuffs. Earmuffs. So just be aware of this. I just be, just be aware of this, but this is just a reality of bad theology hurts people.

And then also bad theology perverts the truth. So just, again, if you have children around, you might want to consider pausing it, turning down the volume.

So please just do that now. So here we go. So according to the prophet

Eve, the mother of all living had opened her legs to the serpent and had sex. The result of the sexual encounter, according to the prophet had brought forth two bloodlines, good and evil.

The doctrine was controversial because of its common usage used by notorious leaders and groups.

Adolf Hitler believed in two common bloodlines and attempted to enact genocide of the Jews. The Ku Klux Klan had also used it for their hate speech against both

Jews and people with black skin. And if the prophet quote unquote was in fact, touring with Roy Davis during his early years as a minister and was actively participating in services conducted by Davis and his brothers in Jeffersonville, I had no doubt that this doctrine would have been a topic of discussion among many times.

So just briefly, I mean, this is, we're kind of around the hour mark, but I don't know, just expand a little bit on that.

Maybe just talk about that just a little bit and just some of his other theology and how, how that really evolved given all those other influences on top of the prophecies.

Yeah. So it's, you know, it, it's really strange and especially strange if you take everything that was said across all of the stage personas, all the different variations and combine them.

Because what happens is the reason that these different varying sex emerge is because stage persona one doesn't match stage persona two in doctrine.

Stage persona three is totally different. And William Branham is, is known for instance, of being one as Pentecostal.

That's how the historians reference him. Yet one of his versions of his stage persona, he says, for we who have accepted the

Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, one stage persona is condemning the other stage persona who accepted the

Trinity. So these different sex emerge by taking all of the different conflicting things that he said and putting them together.

So in my head growing up, when I'm, you know, thinking through this, I, I believe that this thing that he called serpent seed was actually in the

Bible. And because I had blended everything that he said, when I would read the different chapters of Genesis, I was reading it through what he said instead of just plainly and avoiding all the extra biblical stuff that he added.

Right. Right. But so in summary, if you take again, the different conflicting versions of a stage persona, he claimed that Jesus Christ was an angel, the

Archangel Michael, very similar to the Jehovah's Witness, I think teach the same thing.

And that Michael, which is Jesus and his theology and the devil,

Satan fought each other in the wars and that there was another civilization that existed pre

Genesis. And then the theology skips in timeline.

It doesn't really explain how this other civilization repopulated, but he claims that Satan is the one who designed the female and that Satan designed the female specifically with the sole intent to deceive the male and to deceive the male for the purposes of sex.

So according to William Branham's theology, the original sin in the garden of Eden was because Eve and the serpent had a sexual union.

And according to Branham's theology, and this is kind of general Christian identity,

Christian identity theology that Eve and the serpent produce

Cain as the offspring. Now, the first time I came out of this cold and I'm again,

I read the Bible like 15 times, just trying to, trying to wash all this weirdness out of my head.

Yeah. I remember what I remember very clearly. I was reading Genesis one and I just busted out laughing.

My wife came in and said, what are you laughing at? I'm holding the Bible, right? So I feel like sacrilegious. I'm reading

Genesis one and I'm laughing, but I came to verse, I think it's 22 in Genesis.

It says, be fruitful and multiply, or Genesis one, be fruitful and multiply.

This is before Eve. So I'm thinking in my head, okay, so if the original sin is sex and it's

Eve, well, here's Adam by himself in the one, you know, the two together, be fruitful and multiply.

What does that have Adam doing? And that's just, I don't know. It just, it struck me as the whole thing is just so freaky weird.

You know, you read through, even in the new Testament, it says from the blood of one woman, you know, or one from the blood of one man comes all living creatures.

The two blood lines really don't work. If you read the whole Bible, it only works if you take this little verse and this verse, and then let's put those two verses together out of the context.

But it's very popular among white supremacy groups. You know,

Ku Klux Klan, even Nazi Germany, they had some variation of this weird thing. And that definitely helps with the clarity because again,

Andrew and I worked this very part -time or have been, and we get messages all the time where I was like,

I'd never heard of that before. But I remember recently, it was either one person or a couple of people were saying, you need to do an episode on Christian identity.

And I was just confused by that. Like, what is that? Was that some sort of Christian, like some sort of personal development?

I'm identified as a Christian, right? Yeah. Like, right. Or like, what's the self -help development courses that gets a little cultish, but it's

Christian based. So I had no point of reference. So you saying that was actually helped gave some immediate clarity when you mentioned that.

So I appreciate that. And again, if anyone's listening, this is an example too. I appreciate you, John, talking about the ability of how you had to read the

Bible over and over again to kind of wash yourself or kind of reprogram. And I think this is for anyone, if you are in a

Christian church, there's a great book by Janice Hutchinson called Out of the Cults and Into the Church. And just understand that whoever you talk with, if they are from a spiritually abusive infrastructure, where one, there's probably a lot of mental or psychological abuse, possibly physical abuse, or unfortunately, it's heartbreaking, in many cases, sexual abuse, a lot of that is intertwined with a lot of distorted theology.

And there's a lot of baggage there. And, you know, underlying, you know, the mental health epidemic is huge amongst people who are ex -cult members.

So needless to say that it's just something that if you're dealing with an ex -cult member, this is something that you need to be wary of.

It's something you have to be gracious with and patient, because it takes a lot of time to unthink and to unlearn and to, the word deconstruction has been going on recently, but to deconstruct in a healthy and biblical sense in regards to being conformed, being transformed by the renewing of your mind.

So John, I really appreciate you sharing that. So while we do this, we are, Andrew, do you have a thought real quickly?

Yeah, I just had a question in terms of something when I was watching some of the videos online, and I'm not sure if you can dive deeper into it, but it was something that I found really interesting that William Branham believed.

And it was talking about, there was a second Bible, and it was the Great Pyramid of Giza. What was the first Bible to William Branham?

And then there's the second, and how does that relate to some of his doctrines in a sense?

I'm trying to ask it in a nutshell, but I'm sure there's more to unpack there, John, but I want to hear it from, and I thought of a nickname for you, by the way,

Professor John, you are the professor. So take me to school, professor. I don't know about that.

Above the church that my grandfather pastored for 50 years, the Branham Tabernacle in Jeffersonville, Indiana, there is this eagle and below the eagle is this sword, an actual physical steel sword.

And there's a problem in Jeffersonville. Jeffersonville isn't well known for being a fully respectable town, and there are bad parts of town.

And from time to time, people steal the sword, and there's this big problem because there's a weapon right there, and all you got to do is go get it.

I never will forget how shocked that I was when I saw the early photographs of the church.

Above the door of the church was the pentagram, the five -pointed star, tilted slightly sideways.

And I'm sure if both of you know your cult backgrounds, what the slightly tilted star means.

William Branham claimed that the first Bible was the Zodiac, and he specifically mentions, although he gets them slightly incorrect, he mentions the different Zodiac signs.

He literally claimed that the Zodiac was the

Bible. Then he says that the great pyramid of Giza was the second Bible.

And what's really weird about this is, aside from the fact that it's weird that a

Christian is claiming that the Zodiac is a Bible, there's this whole subset of theology that even today, some of these different sects within the cult, they go into this weird pyramidology where they've got this architectural structure of the great pyramid of Giza, and they're describing this is the holy of holies, and all this weird stuff that has absolutely nothing to do with the burial place of, who is it,

Seti? I can't remember who's buried in there. But anyway, William Branham wrongly claimed, and I feel stupid believing this,

I really do. But he goes into this weird pyramidology, and he claims that this was a

Bible, he claims it was built by Enoch, and he says it was placed so perfectly in the geographical center of the earth that no matter what time of day, it never cast a shadow.

And I never will forget, you guys will laugh at this, so I grew up, we off and on had, no television was allowed in most churches.

My family had it off and on. But I never forget, I'm watching an episode of DuckTales.

And DuckTales, the music comes on, they're running, and they're running from the wait, that pyramid has a shadow.

It struck me, and so it was years later, I just put that in the back of my mind as a kid, years later when

I came out of this thing, that was like the first thing I had to look up, wait a minute, does the pyramid really have a shadow or not?

Wow. Wow, that's interesting. Gosh, that's taken me back thinking about DuckTales and all that.

I know. It's just interesting. So some of that weird theology, it's very similar to things that the early founders, that Charles Taze Russell, some of his weird pyramid things.

We've got Joseph Smith and the eagles in pentagrams. This is very Masonic sounding in a way.

Well, even his headstone, a pyramid as well, to me, his headstone where he's now buried is very, very extra,

I would say. Yeah, there's a very Masonic influence. I try not to go big and deep into conspiracy theories on the website because unless I can prove it, and the problem is these are secret societies, you're never going to find, okay, was

William Brannan Mason? I don't know. But if you look at just the wide array of signs that he's given you, he's constantly using the number 33 in everything.

He's using numerologies that match Masons. He's got a pyramid tomb. He's saying that the

Zodiac. It's written all over this movement.

Well, fascinating. Well, I appreciate you coming on again, John. And so what we're going to do is we're going to go and wrap up here.

We're going to continue with the journey of William Brannan and his movement and the message.

And eventually where we are headed to is the most notorious cult leader in American history,

Jim Jones. There ends up being some very interesting and significant things that happen. So we are on the path.

We are paving the way through William Brannan and the message and the Brannanites and all that.

But eventually we are going to work our way and pave through how it connects to the road to Jonestown, which the connection will be shocking for a lot of people.

It's almost like one of those expansion packs of a game where you think about, like Disney Plus had a series where they're expanding on some of the

Avengers series, like the one on Captain America. WandaVision too. Yeah. Well, like WandaVision, where they're expanding on the

Marvel universe. And in a weird way, this is like an expansion of the whole

Jim Jones world and universe, because this is a weird sort of prequel, but it's also kind of going alongside of it.

So I'm fascinated to see how that unravels. WandaVision actually came up today in relation to William Brannan.

I run these, I have networks of private support groups, this underground railroad of sorts to help people out.

And this woman just came to terms, I want to say it was yesterday, with the fact that everything that she believed her entire life was a lie.

And I was explaining to her that, yeah, I went through the same thing. And I used

WandaVision as the example. I said, my family just recently got Disney Plus, and I just watched the

WandaVision series. And I could not help while I'm watching this, but to think about my life in this cult, right?

Because we're basically stuck in the 50s. I'm growing up in a world where I'm still believing that we're in the

Cold War. I believe Russia's going to invade us. I believe that the A -bomb is going to be dropping.

All of the stuff that they were feeling and experiencing in the 50s, I'm feeling it. But the difference is, in WandaVision, they've got this facade of a world that they're living in, but she's doing it trying to save his life.

She's doing it for a good cause. William Brannan literally kept me captivated all those years for this political agenda that I wholly do not agree with.

Wow. Wow. That's definitely fascinating. I definitely appreciate you coming on here again,

John. So again, we'll wrap things up here right now, and we'll talk to you all as we continue to explore

William Brannan and the roads to Jonestown. Next time on Cultist, we're entering to the Kingdom of the Cults.