Cult Connections

Jim Jones                        Jones and dead followers   Congressman Leo Ryan

Keith’s version of events is confirmed and expanded upon by others. As noted, “the devil is in the details.” Hence, it is important to know the “rest of the story.” In The Black Hole of Guyana (1985), John Judge reveals that Jonestown also functioned as a brutal labor/concentration camp as well as a center for mind-control experimentation and various lucrative criminal enterprises. Most astonishingly, Jonestown was just one in a network of many such slave-labor/mind-control facilities scattered throughout Guyana, Latin America, and other Third World countries! As of 1985, the Jonestown slave labor camp was still fully operational and exploiting victims from another minority, Hmong tribesman, who had been repatriated from Laos after the Vietnam conflict! Judge continues:

(The) final choice for Jonestown, the Matthew’s Ridge section in Guyana is an interesting one. It was originally the site of a Union Carbide bauxite and manganese mine, and Jones used the dock they left behind.[149] At an earlier point, it had been one of seven possible sites chosen for the relocation of the Jews after World War II.[150] Plans to inhabit the jungles of Guyana’s interior with cheap labor date back to 1919.[151] Resources buried there are among the richest in the world, and include manganese, diamonds, gold, bauxite and uranium.[152] Forbes Burnham, the Prime Minister, had participated in a scheme to repatriate Blacks from the UK to work in the area. Like all earlier attempts, it failed.[153]

Once chosen, the site was leased and worked on by a select crew of Temple members in preparation for the arrival of the body of the church. The work was done in cooperation with Burnham and the U.S. Embassy there.[154] But if these were idealists seeking a better life, their arrival in “Utopia” was a strange welcome. Piled into buses in San Francisco, they had driven to Florida. From there, Pan American charter planes delivered them to Guyana.[155] When they arrived at the airport, the Blacks were taken off the plane, bound and gagged.[156] The deception had finally been stripped bare of all pretense. The Blacks were so isolated and controlled that neighbors as close as five miles from the site did not know that Blacks lived at Jonestown. The only public representatives seen in Guyana were white.[157] Guyanese children were “bought” also.[158]

According to survivors’ reports, they entered a virtual slave labor camp. Worked for 16 to 18 hours daily, they were forced to live in cramped quarters on minimum rations, usually rice, bread and sometimes rancid meat. Kept on a schedule of physical and mental exhaustion, they were also forced to stay awake at night and listen to lectures by Jones. Threats and abuse became more common.[159] The camp medical staff under Dr. Lawrence Schacht was known to perform painful suturing without anesthetic. They administered drugs, and kept daily medical records.[160] Infractions of the rules or disloyalty led to increasingly harsh punishments, including forced drugging, sensory isolation in an underground box, physical torture and public sexual rape and humiliation. Beatings and verbal abuse were commonplace. Only the special guards were treated humanely and fed decently.[161] People with serious injuries were flown out, but few ever returned.[162] Perhaps the motto at Jonestown should have been the same as the one at Auschwitz, developed by Larry Schacht’s namesake, Dr. Hjalmar Schacht, the Nazi Minister of Economics, “Arheit Macht Frei,” or “Work Will Make You Free.” Guyana even considered setting up an “Auschwitz-like museum” at the site, but abandoned the idea.[163]

By this point, Jones had amassed incredible wealth. Press estimates ranged from $26 million to $2 billion, including bank accounts, foreign investments and real estate. Accounts were set up worldwide by key members, often in the personal name of certain people in the Temple.[164] Much of this money, listed publicly after the massacre, disappeared mysteriously. It was a fortune far too large to have come from membership alone. The receivership set up by the government settled on a total of $10 million. Of special interest were the Swiss bank accounts opened in Panama, the money taken from the camp, and the extensive investments in Barclay’s Bank.[165] Other sources of income included the German banking family of Lisa Philips Layton, Larry’s mother.[166] Also, close to $65,000 a month income was claimed to come from welfare and social security checks for 199 members, sent to the Temple followers and signed over to Jones.[167] In addition, there are indications that Blakey and other members were supplementing the Temple funds with international smuggling of guns and drugs.[168] At one point, Charles Garry noted that Jones and his community were “literally sitting on a gold mine.” Mineral distribution maps of Guyana suggest he was right.[169]

To comprehend this well-financed, sinister operation, we must abandon the myth that this was a religious commune and study instead the history that led to its formation. Jonestown was an experiment, part of a 30-year program called MK-ULTRA, the CIA and military intelligence code name for mind control.[170] A close study of Senator Ervin’s 1974 report, Individual Rights and the Government’s Role in Behavior Modification, shows that these agencies had certain “target populations” in mind, for both individual and mass control. Blacks, women, prisoners, the elderly, the young, and inmates of psychiatric wards were selected as “potentially violent.”[171] There were plans in California at the time for a Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence, expanding on the horrific work of Dr. José Delgado, Drs. Mark and Ervin, and Dr. Jolly West, experts in implantation, psychosurgery, and tranquilizers. The guinea pigs were to be drawn from the ranks of the “target populations,” and taken to an isolated military missile base in California.[172] In that same period, Jones began to move his Temple members to Jonestown. They were the exact population selected for such tests.[173]

The meticulous daily notes and drug records kept by Larry Schacht disappeared, but evidence did not.[174] The history of MK-ULTRA and its sister programs (MK-DELTA, ARTICHOKE, BLUEBIRD, etc.) records a combination of drugs, drug mixtures, electroshock and torture as methods for control. The desired results ranged from temporary and permanent amnesia, uninhibited confessions, and creation of second personalities, to programmed assassins and preconditioned suicidal urges. One goal was the ability to control mass populations, especially for cheap labor.[175] Dr. Delgado told Congress that he hoped for a future where a technology would control workers in the field and troops at war with electronic remote signals. He found it hard to understand why people would complain about electrodes implanted in their brains to make them “both happy and productive.”[176]

On the scene at Jonestown, Guyanese troops discovered a large cache of drugs, enough to drug the entire population of Georgetown, Guyana (well over 200,000)[177] for more than a year. According to survivors, these were being used regularly “to control” a population of only 1,100 people.[178] One footlocker contained 11,000 doses of thorazine, a dangerous tranquilizer. Drugs used in the testing for MK-ULTRA were found in abundance, including sodium pentathol (a truth serum), chloral hydrate (a hypnotic), demerol, thalium (confuses thinking), and many others.[179] Schacht had supplies of haliopareael and largatil as well, two other major tranquilizers.[180] The actual description of life at Jonestown is that of a tightly run concentration camp, complete with medical and psychiatric experimentation. The stresses and isolation of the victims is typical of sophisticated brainwashing techniques. The drugs and special tortures add an additional experimental aspect to the horror.[181] This more clearly explains the medical tags on the bodies, and why they had to be removed. It also suggests an additional motive for frustrating any chemical autopsies, since these drugs would have been found in the system of the dead.

The story of Jonestown is that of a gruesome experiment, not a religious utopian society. On the eve of the massacre, Forbes Burnham was reportedly converted to “born again” Christianity by members of the Full Gospel Christian Businessman’s Association, including Lionel Luckhoo, a Temple lawyer in Guyana.[182] This same group, based in California, also reportedly converted Guatemalan dictator Rios Montt prior to his massacres there and they were in touch with Jim Jones in Ukiah.[183] They currently conduct the White House prayer breakfasts for Mr. Reagan.[184] With Ryan on his way to Jonestown, the seal of secrecy was broken. In a desperate attempt to test their conditioning methods, the Jonestown elite apparently tried to implement a real suicide drill.[185] Clearly, it led to a revolt, and the majority of people fled, unaware that there were people waiting to catch them.

In the current period, Jonestown is being “repopulated” with 100,000 Laotian Hmong people. Many of them grew opium for CIA money in Southeast Asia. Over 1,000 reside there already under a scheme designed by Billy Graham’s nephew Ernest, and members of the Federation of Evangelical Ministries Association in Wheaton, Illinois (World Vision, World Medical Relief, Samaritan’s Purse, and Carl McIntyre’s International Council of Christian Churches).[194] Similar plans devised by the Peace Corps included moving inner-city Blacks from America to Jamaica, and other Third World countries. And World Relief attempted to move the population of the Island of Dominica to Jonestown.[195] It is only a matter of time before another Jonestown will be exposed, perhaps leading again to massive slaughter. 




Our story so far has hinted at connections to U.S. intelligence, such as the long-term friendship of Jones and CIA associate (and expert torturer- ETK) Dan Mitrione. But the ties are much more direct when a full picture of the operation is revealed. To start with, the history of Forbes Burnham’s rise to power in Guyana is fraught with the clear implication of a CIA coup d’état to oust troublesome independent leader Cheddi Jagan.[196] In addition, the press and other evidence indicated the presence of a CIA agent on the scene at the time of the massacre. This man, Richard Dwyer, was working as Deputy Chief of Mission for the U.S. Embassy in Guyana.[197] Identified in Who’s Who in the CIA, he has been involved since 1959, and was last stationed in Martinique.[198] Present at the camp site and the airport strip, his accounts were used by the State Department to confirm the death of Leo Ryan. At the massacre, Jones said, “Get Dwyer out of here” just before the killings began.[199]

Other Embassy personnel, who knew the situation at Jonestown well, were also connected to intelligence work. U.S. Ambassador John Burke, who served in the CIA with Dwyer in Thailand, was an Embassy official described by Philip Agee as working for the CIA since 1963. A Reagan appointee to the CIA, he is still employed by the Agency, usually on State Department assignments.[200] Burke tried to stop Ryan’s investigation.[201] Also at the Embassy was Chief Consular officer Richard McCoy, described as “close to Jones,” who worked for military intelligence and was “on loan” from the Defense Department at the time of the massacre.[202] According to a standard source, “The U.S. embassy in Georgetown housed the Georgetown CIA station. It now appears that the majority and perhaps all of the embassy officials were CIA officers operating under State Department covers . . .”[203 ] Dan Webber, who was sent to the site of the massacre the day after, was also named as CIA.[204] Not only did the State Department conceal all reports of violations at Jonestown from Congressman Leo Ryan, but the Embassy regularly provided Jones with copies of all congressional inquiries under the Freedom of Information Act.[205]

Ryan had challenged the Agency’s overseas operations before, as a member of the House Committee responsible for oversight on intelligence. He was an author of the controversial Hughes-Ryan Amendment that would have required CIA disclosure in advance to the congressional committees of all planned covert operations. The Amendment was defeated shortly after his death.[206]

Strangely enough, almost every map of Guyana in the major press located Jonestown at a different place following the killings. One map even shows a second site in the area called “Johnstown.”[187] Perhaps there were multiple camps and Leo Ryan was only shown the one they hoped he would see. In any case, the Jonestown model survives, and similar camps, and their sinister designs, show up in many places.

Inside Guyana itself, approximately 25 miles to the south of Matthews Ridge, is a community called Hilltown, named after religious leader Rabbi Hill. Hill has used the names Abraham Israel and Rabbi Emmanuel Washington. Hilltown, set up about the same time as Jonestown, followed the departure of David Hill, who was known in Cleveland, a fugitive of the U.S. courts. Hill rules with an “iron fist” over some 8,000 Black people from Guyana and America who believe they are the Lost Tribe of Israel and the real Hebrews of Biblical prophecy.[188] Used as strong-arm troops, and “internal mercenaries” to insure Burnham’s election, as were Jonestown members, the Hilltown people were allowed to clear the Jonestown site of shoes and unused weapons, both in short supply in Guyana.[189] Hill says his followers would gladly kill themselves at his command, but he would survive since, unlike Jones, he is “in control.”[190]

Rabbi Hill, on the right

During the 1970s and 1980s, a religious group known as the House of Israel became an informal part of the PNC’s security apparatus and engaged in actions such as strikebreaking, pro-government demonstrations, political intimidation, and murder. The House of Israel was led by an ardent PNC supporter, David Hill, locally known as Rabbi Washington. Hill was an American fugitive wanted for blackmail, larceny, and tax evasion. Despite its name, the House of Israel was neither Israeli nor Jewish-oriented. It was, instead, a black supremacist cult claiming that Afro-Guyanese were the original Hebrews. Cult adherents further believed that modern-day Jews were, in fact, descendants of other non-Jewish biblical peoples and were in Israel illegally. Serving as a paramilitary force for the PNC, the House of Israel had 8,000 members, including a 300-member guard force known as the ‘royal cadets.

Similar camps were reported at the time in the Philippines.

The above accounts reveal explosive and important information regarding the modus operandi and identity of the “cryptocracy.” Here is a recap of these important points:

1) In his early career, Jim Jones was a member of Bertrand Russell’s Fellowship for Reconciliation, worked for Naval Intelligence (Office of Naval Intelligence or ONI), and was supported by the U.S. Embassy in Brazil. Jones was also a lifelong personal friend/associate of Dan Mitrione, one of the CIA’s most infamous torturers, who taught torture techniques to many police interrogation units throughout Latin America.

2) The Fellowship financed Jones’ first trip to Brazil in 1961, at which time he visited and received money from CIA headquarters there. By one account, he distributed leaflets, tried to stir up revolutionary sentiments, and participated in a CIA effort to overthrow the Brazilian government.

3) A major funder for Jones’ first church in Indianapolis was Rabbi Maurice Davis, who had worked as chaplain at the Lexington Addiction Research Center, where MKULTRA research had been done, and who was a board member of the American Family Foundation.

4) After Jones moved his fellowship to Ukiah, California, there were reports that behavior modification experiments, including sensory deprivation, were being conducted on his congregation, which was predominantly comprised of blacks.

5) Jones’s group infiltrated and took over the Mendocino state hospital, as part of a government pilot project to deinstitutionalize mental patients. When California Governor cut funding for mental institutions, most of the patients at Mendocino were released to custody of the People’s Temple.

6) Among key supporters of Jones were the Layton family, headed by Dr. Lawrence Laird Layton, who had immigrated to America from Nazi Germany after WWII (ETK- In Operation Paperclip?). Dr. Layton had worked on the Manhattan Project, government programs in chemical and ecological warfare, and Army LSD research. In fact, Layton was Chief of the US Army’s Chemical Warfare Division between 1952 and 1954.

7) The People’s Temple was established at Matthew’s Ridge in northeastern Guyana (near Venezuela), at the site of Union Carbide’s bauxite and manganese mine where precious metals such as gold, diamonds, and uranium are present. This site had been considered as a relocation site for Jews after WWII. Later, Guyanese Prime Minister, Forbes Burnham, participated in a failed plan to relocate blacks from the UK to work there. Prior to it’s use as Jonestown, the CIA established their “Operation Shalom” there, training camp for guerillas to be used in operations in Angola between 1973 and 1975.

8) Jones received support from the U.S. embassy in Georgetown, Guyana, which was headquarters for the CIA and may have been staffed exclusively by CIA officers.

9) Behind its religious front, Jonestown functioned as a brutal slave labor/mind control experiment that exploited mostly blacks, an official “target population” who made up the majority of Jones’ followers (total 1,100). Guyanese children were also “bought.” Jones’ “followers” worked 16 to 18 hours days, were forced to live in cramped quarters, and fed minimal rations. They were forced to stay awake at night and listen to lectures by Jones. Threats and abuse were common. Punishments included forced drugging, sensory isolation in an underground box, electro-shock, physical torture and public rape and humiliation. As we shall discover in other accounts, Jones was bi-sexual and used sex, particularly sodomy, a means of humiliating and controlling both men and women.

10)The camp medical officer, Dr. Lawrence Schacht, kept meticulous daily notes and drug records. His staff was known to perform unnecessary surgery without anaesthetic.

11)Jones became extremely wealthy (estimated worth of between $26 million and $2 billion) and stashed his money in foreign bank accounts, foreign investments, and real estate. Key members set up accounts worldwide. Evidence suggests Temple funds were augmented by profits from members who were involved in international smuggling of guns and drugs.

12)Much of this money disappeared after the mass murder of 913 of Jones’ followers.

13)Congressman Leo Ryan, a member of the House Committee responsible for oversight on intelligence operations was co-author of the Hughes-Ryan Amendment that would have required the CIA to disclose all future covert operations. When Ryan visited Jonestown, he was executed by some of Jones’ white “special guards.” The massacre of some 913 mostly black followers ensued shortly thereafter. The Congressional Amendment was defeated shortly after Ryan’s murder.

14)The ‘cool-aid’ myth is disproven by the fact that the coroner’s report indicates 80 to 90% of the dead had fresh needle marks on their bodies. Others were shot or strangled.

15)Press reports indicate that CIA agent, Richard Dwyer, was on the scene at the time of the massacre.

16)That Washington officials were aware of the Jonestown massacre is indicated by the fact that an aide to National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, brought orders to remove “all politically sensitive papers and forms of identification from the bodies.”

17)The corpse alleged to have been Jones was unidentifiable but did not have Jones’ distinctive chest tattoos.

18)The Jonestown model persists today in other concentration/mind control camps in Guyana and elsewhere in the Third World. Twenty-five miles north of Matthews Ridge is a much larger community called Hilltown, run by Rabbi David Hill (aka Rabbi Washington), of the House of Israel black-supremacist cult. There, some 8,000 black people provide(d) slave labor and mind control subjects. A 300-member guard force known as the “royal cadets” helps keep order. Hill himself was an ex-convict from Cleveland, Ohio.

19)The mass-murder of Jones’ followers was carried out by employees of the American intelligence establishment when Ryan’s visit threatened to expose the operation. The same intelligence establishment controlled the cover-up of the crime and ensured that the media maintained the fiction that Jones was merely a deranged leader of a crazy religious cult.

20)Postscript 1: According to Judge, on the eve of the massacre, Guyanese Prime Minister Forbes was converted to “born again” Christianity by members of the Full Gospel Christian Businessman’s Association. This group, based in California, also reportedly converted Guatemalan dictator, Rios Mont, prior to his massacres there. This same group conducted the daily White House prayer breakfasts for President Reagan.

21)Postcript 2: As of 1985, the People’s Temple site in Guyana was being “repopulated” by Laotian Hmong people, many of whom had grown opium for CIA opium trade during the Vietnam war. This more recent project was designed by Billy Graham’s nephew Ernest and members of the Federation of Evangelical Ministries Association in Illinois.

22)Conclusion 1: The cover story of Reverend Jim Jones and his People’s Temple utopian religious cult/agricultural experiment is merely a front. Actually, Jonestown was a tightly run slave labor/mind control concentration camp run by American intelligence, complete with medical and psychiatric experimentation. It was one of many such camps located throughout the world that were and are being used to advance various geo-political objectives.

23)Conclusion 2: The Jonestown operation fulfilled several intelligence objectives: a) support for a coup d’etat of a left-wing Guyanese Prime Minister, b) cheap labor for the concentration camp, c) test site for continued MK-ULTRA type mind control programs, and d) cover for various international criminal activities.

24)Conclusion 3: The modus operandi of the Jonestown massacre seems similar to that used in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and 9/11. That is, it was an intelligence operation with multiple objectives that was covered up at the high level politicans and by the media. The crimes are attributed to “patsies” or “lone-nuts,” who themselves were groomed for their roles by the intelligence agencies.

The concluding comment from “Latin American High Weirdness,” re: Congressman Ryan’s brave and quixotic attempt to reign in the rogue activities of the CIA:

Nobody interferes with the CIA and gets away with it.

“Something very bad is going on within the CIA and I want to know what it is. I want to shred the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter them to the four winds.”

( JFK, shortly before his assassination)

2. Chile’s “Colonia Dignidad” (Dignity Colony)

The article, “Latin American High Weirdness: “Hand of Death” CIA Satanic Cult Network” (http://www.sott.net/article/244755-Latin-American-High-Weirdness-Hand-of-Death-Satanic-CIA-Cult-Network), provides further details of Jonestown and similar cults (or cults “fronts”). Colonia Dignidad (Dignity Colony) was, another so-called “utopian experiment/religious cult” created and controlled to fulfill covert, illegal political objectives:

President Allende Nazi Paul Schafer Colonia Dignidad compound

In Chile, a similar Utopian community would be called in service under the notorious Pinochet regime after the first democratically-elected Marxist president of Latin America, Salvador Allende, was removed and assassinated during a military coup in the early 1970s. This community, which would become a close alley of the Pinochet regime, was known as Colonia Dignidad. Like Jonestown, it was described as an agricultural experiment and headed by a controversial minister.

In Unholy Alliance (1995), Lavenda states:

Paul Schafer was one of the founders of the Colony of Righteousness and was, and is, its only leader.  (Ex-Nazi) Schafer jumped bail in Germany in 1961 on charges of child sexual abuse, but that did not stop him from taking a group of families with him when he fled to Chile, arriving there in 1962 at the age of forty with around sixty ‘blonde, blue-eyed settlers’… including some children who were brought there under false pretenses, taken from their families back in Germany. 

His flock came from the town of Siegburg, across the Rhine from Bonn, where Schafer claimed to be a psychologist, and where he ran a youth home where the sexual-abuse charges originated.  Schafer, also the leader of a Baptist sect (a sect which evidently condones sexual intercourse between adults and children among other peculiarities), bought an old ranch called El Lavadero about 250 miles south of Santiago in the Parral region and quickly converted it into a self-sufficient, model community known as Colonia Dignidad, the ‘Colony of Righteousness’ or ‘Dignity Colony.’

The population of the Colony eventually grew to about 350, composed of 250 adults and 100 children.  According to reports in the Chilean and German press, the sexes are rigorously separated and sexual intercourse is forbidden (except, one gathers, at the discretion of Schafer).  And, since sex is prohibited, the only way the Colony has been able to increase its population has been by ‘importing’ children from Germany. German authorities have been investigating charges that from thirty to forty children reported missing from Bonn and Cologne areas have wound up at the Colony.  Thus, charges of both child abuse and international child abduction have been leveled at this remote cult community by eyewitnesses, escapees, and responsible members of the West German and Chilean governments.  The parallels between Colonia Dignidad and the stories told by ‘satanic cult survivors’ however, are even stronger.

Spanish is not spoken: instead, only German, and, oddly, English are used.  Old-fashioned, 1940s-era clothing is worn and fourteen-hour workdays are the norm.  No television, radio, or newspapers are allowed in the Colony.  There is, however, a shortwave unit on the premises which is used to communicate with an office the Colony maintains in Santiago…

The Colony established a free clinic on its premises: free, that is, on specific days of the week to members of the local population.  They also have their own factory for processing meat, power plant… and their own airfield.  By 1985, they had even opened their own roadside restaurant on the Pan American Highway.

Accounts of the size of the Colony vary from news report to news report.  Everything from 12,000 acres to 37,000 acres has been offered, and accounts of its operations also include a mine, a lumber mill, and a gravel factory.  The author believes it is safe to say that the Colony has grown considerably over the years and that estimates of a 37,000-acre settlement might not be far from the mark, considering the other purposes to which the Colony was put both during and after the Allende regime.

…in 1966, the first of many accusations against Schafer and the Colony surfaced when Wolfgang Muller escaped the ‘watchdogs, electronic alarms and six-foot barbed wire fences to describe life inside the Colony. Muller – who had been brought over from Germany as a member of the original Sieburg group when he was sixteen – claimed that he had been forced into slave labor at the Colony, was beaten, and had been sexually abused by Schafer in Germany when he was twelve years old.  One of Muller’s more interesting claims – especially in light of later events – is his insistence that Schafer had given him ‘memory-altering drugs’ when Muller attempted to rebel or to reveal the details of his abuse at Schafer’s hands.  He also complained of electroshock treatments being administered by camp doctors (shades of Barbie at Montluc Prison).  After his escape, he wound up at the West German embassy in Santiago and now lives in that country under an assumed name, still afraid for his life.”  

Child abuse, memory altering drugs, electroshock treatments – it was into this fertile environment some of the Pincochet regime’s more unfortunate political prisoners found themselves.  The primary liaison between Colonia Dignidad and the Pincochet regime was an American CIA agent named Michael Townley who also served as a member of the Chilean secret police in addition to helping plan the military coup that ousted Allende.

Michael Townley,   Dr. Josef Mengele, Nazi  Bound for Gitmo

CIA agent                             and MKULTRA torturer   

Levenda (1995) continues:

By the spring of 1973, however, rumors of an impending military coup were rampant in the capital.  Among the conspirators creating discord both in the city and in the countryside was a young American, Michael Vernon Townley.  Townley was a member of Patria y Libertad and an associate of other right-wing terror groups.  A right-wing fanatic himself who carried out assignments for a variety of masters, Townley also contributed to the development of the interrogation program at Colonia Dignidad.

Working directly for, and reporting to, the generals, Townley was given the rank of major in the Chilean Army and together with Colonel Pedro Espinosa and the Chilean Secret Police (DINA), liaised with Patria y Libertad to create a climate of terror in the country conductive to a military coup…

With the coup, however, the Colony got a chance to put its electroshock and narcotics ‘therapies’ to the test.  Townley and DINA agents had the run of the Colony, both at Parral and at the Colony office in Santiago. While DINA maintained contact with its agents all over the world through the Colony’s radio link, Townley helped design the specially equipped interrogation cells.  These were tiny, soundproofed rooms built underground where ‘poltical prisoners’ were taken not only for actual interrogation of a political or military nature, but also for the purpose of developing new methods of torture. 

At first, each prisoner was questioned closely to obtain sufficient information concerning his or her personality in order to develop an appropriate torture and interrogation scheme.  This individualized approach is already well known to the intelligence professionals the author has come into contact over the years. The ostensible goal is to enable the interrogator to so finely tune the torture procedure that the victim surrenders his or her will more completely, more expeditiously.  In practice, however, and with such a ‘scientifically’ adjusted scheme of programmed sadism, there is tremendous room for an interrogator who is so inclined to subject the victim to unimaginable suffering over a long and sustained period of time.  That this is what, in fact, took place at the Colony is beyond doubt…”

The author of “Latin American High Weirdness” continues the grim saga:

According to a UN report Levenda cites, detainees of the Colony had their heads covered with leather hoods, and were then taken to these underground cells were they were subjected to a bombardment of electronic equipment including loudspeakers and microphones in addition to electric shocks.  The Colony’s interrogation techniques have shades of both Gitmo and 1984 in addition to the CIA’s own experiments in its various MK-ULTRA projects.

Over course, it won’t come as a surprise to learn that Paul Schafer was a former Nazi who maintained ties with some of the more notorious war criminals in hiding in South America.  Josef Mengele is widely believed to have been a guest of the Colony, for instance.  Certainly his ‘expertise’ and first-hand experience in ‘enhanced’ interrogation methods would have been much appreciated there.  Mengele and Michael Townley would have surely had some interesting conversations.

Paul Schafer was finally forced out of Chile in 1997 as charges of child molestation were finally brought against him.  In 2005 he was arrested in Argentina and extradited to Chile where he was given a 20-year prison sentence.  Shortly after Schafer’s arrest, the Colony was raided which led to the discovery of a massive cache of weapons that included machine guns, rocket launchers and even a tank.  As of 2005 the Colony had been taken over by Chilean officials.

While it’s certainly lovely that Schafer and the Colony were finally brought down, researchers have asserted that Colonia Dignidad was but one such camp in South America.  Another rumored campsite supposedly existed at Pisagua, Chile.  It is now acknowledged that there was some kind of prison camp at this location. The similarities between Colonia Dignidad and Hilltown (Guyana) are also striking.  Both communities, which featured fanatical followers from foreign countries driven by doctrines of racial superiority, were incorporated into the security apparatuses of the two nations they became involved in.  The major differences seem to be that Hilltown, with over 8000 residents, was more of an overt paramilitary force while Colonia Dignidad was geared more toward ‘intelligence’ work.

Colonia Dignidad was another ‘religious’ community with a political agenda (it had been used as a torture and interrogation center by the Chilean secret police during the overthrow of President Salvador Allende in 1973), was completely populated by German citizens (as Jonestown was by American citizens), was run by a minister of religion who was also a sexual sadist, etc.  In both cases, orphaned children and foster children were exported to the colonies, and financial subsidies derived from their respective governments.  In both cases, the colonies used shortwave radio communications with their officers in the country’s capitols.  Those offices were used by members to influence government officials, and, in the case of Jonestown, one Temple member was ordered to become the paramour of a Guyanese government official.  And on and on.  The parallels are almost too numerous to mention.”

Various authors, including Klein (The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, 2007), document that the September 11, 1973 coup in Chile was an American CIA operation.  The Amnesty International website states that after coup:

     Tens of thousands of men and women were subsequently arrested and tortured.   Many are still missing and many thousands left the country as exiles.  3,216 people are officially recognized as missing or murdered, while 38,254 people are recognized as survivors of political imprisonment and/or torture.

It seems clear that Colonia Dignidad fulfilled a role in the overall coup strategy, both as a center for torture and interrogation of political prisoners and as a slave labor camp.  Important revelations from the above the testimony re: Colonia Dignidad include:

1)    Paul Schafer, a former Nazi accused of child molestation, jumped bail in Germany in 1961 and relocated to Chile in 1962. There, he became founder of the ‘Colony of Righteousness’ and then, its sole leader.  In Germany, Schafer had been leader of a Baptist sect as well as a youth home, from whence the charges of pedophilia derived.

2)    Cult members were exclusively imported from Germany.

3)    The Colonia Dignidad compound involved partnership between cult leaders, Chile’s secret police (DINA), CIA officers such as Michael Townley Welch, and Nazi war criminals such as Joseph Mengele.

4)    Although officially described as an “agricultural center,” the compound functioned as an interrogation and torture center for “disappeared” Chilean political dissidents at the time of the 1973 (CIA-orchestrated) military coup, in which democratically-elected Allende was replaced by Pinochet, a fascist, military dictator.

5)    MKULTRA style torture techniques were refined and “personalized” at the camp.

6)    Another Chilean torture camp exists(ed) at Pisagua, Chile, some 25 miles away.   There were probably others as well.

7)    Schafer’s followers were forced to work 14-hour workdays.  Commercial operations included processing meat, a power plant, a mine, a lumber mill, a gravel factory as well as a restaurant.

8)    No sex was allowed for cult members.  Charges of child abuse and international child abduction were leveled at the community.

9)    Detainees claim that ‘memory-altering drugs’ and electroshock treatments were administered by camp doctors.  Detainees had their heads covered with hoods (as at Gitmo and Abu Graib), were taken to underground cells, and were subjected to bombardment by electronic equipment, including loudspeakers, and electric shocks.

3.  Adolfo Constanzo, the Matamoros cult, and Satanism

The author of “Latin American High Weirdness,” states:

The Matamoros cult… run by the notorious Adolfo Constanzo (was) one of the most concrete examples of a ‘Satanic’ cult of the past few decades….

In Programmed to Kill; The Politics of Serial Murder (2004), McGowan describes the grizzly details of unearthing ritually murdered victims in Mexico.

After a decade had passed… yet another excavation was begun, at a ranch near Juarez, Mexico.  That property was, strangely enough, located precisely where Henry Lee Lucas had claimed that the ‘Hand of Death’ cult maintained a ranch.  The first reports on the Juarez ranch surfaced on December 1, 1999… a Los Angeles Times report noted that the ‘clandestine burial grounds [were] practically within sight of the U.S. border.’

Early reports indicated that authorities anticipated exhuming between 100 and 300 bodies from mass graves on the ranch, including twenty-two missing U.S. citizens and a number of former FBI and DEA informants. The investigation was quickly expanded to include at least three more possible burial grounds in the area…

Of course anyone who follows the news will remember that Juarez has seen a massive amount of women murdered, some with ritualistic overtones, over the past decade.  Once U.S. authorities took over the 1999 investigation of the Juarez ranch the body total dropped from at least 100 to only nine victims – shades of Jonestown and its ever-changing body count.  Naturally, any possibility that there were other sites was also quickly dismissed.

From left to right:  Unearthing more victims at Matamoros, Mexico, newspaper headlines proclaiming the criminals are Satanists, and Perception Management (PSYOP) logo.

The above brief introduction to the Matamoros cult resonates with now familiar themes; mass murders, ritual murders, connections with intelligence agencies, foreign influence, and media cover-up.   The author of “Latin American High Weirdness” explores these connections:

Though downplayed in most press reports, the Matamoros cult was largely an American entity.  Its leader was Adolfo Constanzo, a Cuban-American born in Miami, Florida and raised in Miami and San Juan, Puerto Rico.  Its ‘high priestess’ was Sara Aldrete, an honor student at Southmost, Texas College in Brownsville.  One of the cult’s top lieutenants, Serafin Hernandez Garcia, also lived in Brownsville and attended Southmost – as a law enforcement major.  Serafin’s grandfather was the owner of Rancho Santa Elena, where the cult performed its ritual sacrifices and buried many of its victims.  Another cult member, drug baron Elio Hernandez Riveria, also hailed from Brownsville.  Yet another lived in Weslaco, Texas.

I can’t help but be reminded of the People’s Temple and Jonestown when considering the perception of Constanzo’s cult. While they are generally regarded as a Mexican entity in many accounts of the cult, their genesis and leadership was clearly from north of the border.  The People’s Temple was dominated by African-Americans yet the hierarchy was predominately white. The tragedy that was Jonestown unfolded in Guyana, South America, yet it was a tragedy largely involving Americans. Constanzo, a Cuban-American hailing from Miami, would relocate to Mexico in 1984.  By 1989 he had built a modest, but ever-growing, drug ring that was centered around the Afro-Caribbean cult practices of Santeria and Palo Mayombe.  The cult would include several Mexican celebrities in addition to both fellow drug smugglers as well as several high ranking Mexican police (who were instrumental in the rise of Constanzo).  Sacrifice was central to Constanzo’s cult – both animal as well as human.

Adolfo de Jesus Costanzo

There are strong suggestions that both the cult members and leaders were victims of mind control.  In Buried Secrets: A True Story of Serial Murder (1992), Hume relates:

Many of the cult members displayed bizarre, detached behavior. In many cases they were described as emotionless – robotic, even. This was especially true of Elio Hernandez and other cult members who were arrested in the initial wave around Rancho Santa Elena.

One of the most vicious of the Matamoros cultists, ‘Little’ Serafin Hernandez Garcia, was especially unnerving to the police.  The interrogation of Little Serafin took five hours.  As they listened, the agents sometimes crossed themselves.  Some of them had wondered why their superstitious commandante kept strings of garlic, religious candles, amulets, and other charms of good luck in his office.  Now they were glad to have them as they listened to young Hernandez’s tale unfold.

They had heard of black magic all their lives.  Now they were seeing it work.  A man with no soul.  And Little Serafin did seem cold, without feeling, without any idea that what he had done was morally monstrous.

In the case of Sara Aldrete, there was even evidence of a split personality.  (Aldrete was the American honors student from Texas College in Brownsville, Texas.)

In Hell Ranch: Nightmare of Voodoo, Drugs, & Death in Matamoros
(1992), Linedecker adds:

But investigators with the Mexico City attorney’s office were unsure how to take Sara’s confession because the accused ‘godmother’ of the cult had begun to show disturbing signs of a split personality.  As the days wore on, three separate personas became evident – one for the police, one for the television cameras and a third that emerged when she talked to herself.

U.S. Customs Service Agent Oran Neck told a reporter with the Houston Chronicle just days after Sara’s arrest that she had lost touch with reality.  He said that she was demonstrating a dual personality…

McGowan (1994) offers this historical portrait of the cult’s charismatic leader, Adolfo de Jesus Costanzo:

A modeling assignment took the handsome young sorcerer to Mexico City in 1983, and he spent his free time telling fortunes with tarot cards in the city’s infamous ‘Zona Rosa.’  Before returning to Miami, Adolfo collected his first Mexican disciples, including Martin Quintana, homosexual ‘psychic’ Jorge Montes, and Omar Orea, obsessed with the occult from age fifteen.  In short order, Constanzo seduced both Rodriquez and Orea, claiming one as his ‘man’ and the other as his ‘woman,’ depending on Adolfo’s romantic whim.

By mid-1984, Adolfo had moved to Mexico City, where he served as something of a ‘psychic to the stars,’ earning extravagant fees and living quite lavishly.  His fastidiously neat and orderly home in a high-dollar suburb of Mexico’s capital was, interestingly enough, located directly across an elementary school.  Described as having a magnetic personality, Constanzo attracted an array of famous and colorful people – including entertainment stars, fashion models, transsexual nightclub performers, politicians, businessmen, crime lords, police officials and civil servants.

In Raising Hell: Encyclopedia of Devil Worship and Satanic Crime

(1994), Newton states:

At first glance, the most peculiar aspect of Constanzo’s new career was the appeal he seemed to have for ranking law-enforcement officers.  At least four members of the Federal Judicial Police joined Constanzo’s cult in Mexico City: one of them, Salvador Garcia, was a commander in charge of narcotics investigations; another, Florentino Ventura, retired from the federales to lead the Mexican branch of Interpol.  In a country where bribery – mordida – permeates all levels of law enforcement and federal officers sometimes serve as triggermen for drug smugglers, corruption is not unusual, but the devotion of Constanzo’s followers ran deeper than cash on the line.  In or out of uniform, they worshipped Adolfo as a minor god in his own right, their living conduit to the spirit world.

(It was in fact the Mexican police who paved the way for Constanzo’s entrance into the lucrative world of drug trafficking.)

In 1986, Florentino Ventura introduced Constanzo to the drug-dealing Calzada family, then one of Mexico’s dominant narcotics cartels. Constanzo won the hard-nosed dealers over with his charm and mumbo jumbo, profiting immensely from his contacts with the gang.  By early 1987, he was able to pay $60,000 cash for a condominium in Mexico City, buying himself a fleet of luxury cars that included an $80,000 Mercedes Benz. When not working magic for the Calzadas or other clients, Adolfo staged scams of his own, once posing as a DEA agent to rip off a coke dealer in Guadalajara, selling the stash through his police contacts for a cool $100,000.”

On April 30, Guillermo Calzada and six members of his household vanished under mysterious circumstances. They were reported missing on May 1, police noting melted candles and other evidence of a strange religious ceremony at Calzada’s office.  Six more days elapsed before the officers began fishing mutilated remains from the Zumpango River.  Seven corpses were recovered in the course of a week, all bearing signs of sadistic torture – fingers, toes, and ears removed, hearts and sex organs excised, part of the spine ripped from one body, two others missing brains.  The vanished parts, as it turned out, had gone to feed Constanzo’s cauldron of blood, building up his strength for greater conquests yet to come.

The author of “Latin American High Weirdness” continues:

We will start with Constanzo’s religion.  He is in many instances in the blogosphere (and even by researchers such as David McGowan and Michael Newton) described as a Satanist.  His mother and other family members have sworn up and down that Constanzo was nothing but a good Catholic boy.  Many have claimed that he practiced Santeria.

Constanzo was initiated into both the occult and the criminal underworld at a young age.  His first teacher was his mother, who was a practitioner of Santeria.

A Santeria ritual                       Delia

Hume (1992) states:

Adolfo Constanzo’s earliest childhood memory was not of a favorite toy or a parent’s smile, but the gurgling death rattle of a chicken’s slit throat, its blood offered up to the ancient African gods.  He knew a home filled with decay and blood, inuring him to death.  His reward for good behavior was the gift of an animal to mutilate or kill…

There was the power that shedding blood brought, the essence of Santeria.  Give blood to the gods, and they will answer your prayers.  There was the daily embrace of death and decay inside Delia’s filthy and bloodstained home, the basis of Palo Mayombe’s magic.  Above all, a palero must relish the stench of decomposing flesh, for he must take the evil spirits of the dead inside him, becoming possessed by them.

In addition to being a follower of Santeria, Delia was also quite a frequent small time criminal.

Newton (1994) states:

Adolfo’s mother had introduced him to the santeria cult around age nine, with side trips from Puerto Rico to Haiti for instruction in voodoo, but there were still more secrets to be learned, and in 1976 he was apprenticed to a practitioner of palo mayombe.  His occult ‘godfather’ was already rich from working with local drug dealers, and he imparted a philosophy that would follow Adolfo to his grave: ‘Let the nonbelievers kill themselves with drugs.  We will profit from their foolishness.'”

Of Costanzo’s godfather, Hume (1992) writes:

Constanzo’s Haitian padrino was such a man.  He was not interested in love spells or acts of benevolence, only in spilling blood and taking life.  He passed that bloodlust on to his young apprentice, dispensing lessons, beatings, and exposure to the macabre in equal measures until nothing had an effect on him. Adolfo took the beatings as if they were a part of growing up; he met the horror with a child’s eagerness.

 A Palo Mayombe shrine, which Adolfo’s Haitian padrino would have taught him how to make

Linedecker (1992) provides background on Santeria and Palo Mayombe:

Santeria in its present form was first practiced around 2500 B.C. in what is now known as Nigeria, on the banks of expansive Niger River.  It was then that Yoruba tribesmen first developed the nature religion that allowed mortals to approach the gods through worship of natural objects such as shells, feathers, and herbs.

Santeria – Spanish for ‘worship of saints’ – spread to the New World in the 1500s when slaves brought captured black Africans to the Southern United States and the Caribbean as an inexpensive source of manual labor.

The Africans had no choice but to work for their new masters, but they didn’t really abandon their old gods.  Ordered to adopt the white man’s religion, many of them outwardly complied and, to their masters, seemed to have adopted Catholicism and its saints. But among themselves, the slaves learned to identify each of the saints with one of their own African gods.  So when they were seen by owners apparently praying to a small clay image of Saint Lazarus, for instance, they may instead have been petitioning the ancient Yoruba god and patron of the sick, Babalu-‘Aye’.  Or if they were kneeling before an image of Christ on the cross, they may have been seeking communion with Oloru’n-Orofi, the Creator Himself.

The clandestine Santeria ceremonies helped homesick and frightened slaves maintain a strong bond with an Africa thousands of miles away.  Gradually, the religion based on old Yoruba beliefs, with a strong meld of Catholicism, spread through the islands, Central and South America.  The religion flourished in the New World, and although it maintained many of its secret ways, it gradually moved into the open; today it is widely practiced alongside Catholicism in the islands and in Latin America.  Santeria established an especially strong foothold in Cuba and in Brazil, where, in slightly different form, it is known as Macumba, or Umbanda.  And increasingly, worship of the old Yoruba gods has moved onto mainland North America and is growing in popularity among Hispanics, blacks, and Anglos.

Practitioners of Santeria, called Santeros, worship a bewildering array of deities, called Orishas, who are represented in their dual role as Catholic saints and ancient African gods.  They can be summoned for help during times of need or crisis.  Santeros maintain that the orishas are extremely powerful, and each control specific aspects of life, such as purity, employment, health – and death.

Described by experts as an evil black-magic flip side of Santeria, Palo Mayombe is a religion where disciples call for help from Catholic saints, ancient African spirit gods and the tortured souls of the enslaved dead.  It has its roots in the impenetrable jungles of the African Congo, and like Santeria, its practice was melded with Catholicism by slaves after reaching the New World.

Some santeros keep two altars in their house – one for Santeria and one for Palo Mayombe.  Their approach to natural magic is similar, but there are vast differences between the two beliefs.  Santeria reputedly offers its gods the blood of animal sacrifices killed quickly and humanely, while the animal and human sacrifices offered during some Palo Mayombe rituals are deliberately tortured and horribly mutilated.  Pain and fear are powerful elements of the rites.

Sometimes the blood of the sacrificial victim is consumed by participants in ceremonies, acts occasionally followed by other vile forms of necrophilia and cannibalism.  Parts of victims are boiled in black n’gangas – similar to the crimson-tinged cauldrons found in the ceremonial hut on the Santa Elena Ranch. Palo Mayombe cultists believe that the spirits of the victims will become trapped in the cauldrons and enslaved, to be called on for protection or to carry out evil.  Some Palo Mayombe practitioners prefer that brain tissue be left in skulls used in the obscene acts of necromancy so that the agonized spirits they have summoned can think and act more intelligently.

Constanzo also seemingly added aspects of Mexican folk magic and rituals of the Aztecs to his belief system.  Many of his victims were found with their hearts ritualistically removed in a fashion similar to how the Aztecs were thought to remove them, for instance.  Is it also possible that the Sirius/Sothis religion that I’ve chronicled before also influenced Constanzo’s belief system?

Probably the two chief advocates of the so-called Sirius tradition are Robert K.G. Temple, an Oriental Studies and Sanskrit major from the University of Pennsylvania and fellow at the Royal Astronomical Society, and Kenneth Grant, the former head of the Typhonian Order and Aleister Crowley disciple.  Unlikely bedfellows indeed, yet both presented compelling theories of a cult whose belief system revolved around the star Sirius and that has existed in some form or other since at least ancient Sumeria.  Temple built his theory off of the traditions of the Dogon people while Grant’s was based upon the occult traditions Crowley taught him.  Both theories held Africa to be a kind of repository of occult traditions.

I’ll allow the great Robert Anton Wilson to sum up Temple’s theory:

Temple claimed that Earth had been visited by an advanced race from a planet in the system of the double star, Sirius, around 4500 B.C.  Temple based this assertion on the fact that definite and specific knowledge of the Sirius system can be found in the mythology of the Babylonians, the Egyptians, and some surviving African tribes – knowledge which modern astronomy has only rediscovered with the fantastically delicate instruments of the last two decades…

…Temple’s evidence… could be interpreted to indicate the arrival of people from Sirius who had come here in a physical space ship around 4500 B.C.  According to Temple, information about this had been passed on through various initiatory orders in the ancient Mediterranean and in Africa to the present time…”

(from Wilson’s, The Cosmic Trigger, pg. 9-10)

The author of “Latin American High Weirdness” interjects:

I’ve speculated that the ancient goddess cults revolved around Sirius worship before here.  Santeria and Palo Mayombe, the two belief systems of which the bulk of Constanzo’s magical practices were based around, both derived from Africa and both were very ancient belief systems.  Is it possible that parts of the Sirius tradition were incorporated into these belief systems long ago?  I do not know enough about either religion to answer definitively either way to that question. However, I have chronicled the overlap between Freemasonry and Haitian Vodou before here (http://visupview.blogspot.com/2010/11/haitian-lodge.html), so perhaps there are ties between Santeria and Palo Mayombe and even more ancient occult traditions.  It may even be that Santeria and Palo Mayombe represent the Sirius tradition in its rawest incarnation.

As I noted in part IV of this series, the first major ritual slaying attributed to the Constanzo cult was the killing of the Calzada family, one of the prime drug cartels in Mexico at the time. Constanzo sacrificed several prominent members on Walpurgis Night, one of the chief holidays in northern and central European paganism.  Is this further evidence that a more ancient occult tradition, possibly one tied to Sirius, influenced Constanzo’s cult?  This is the only overt evidence that I’ve found linking Constanzo’s practices to European occultism, but I can’t help but feel there are much deeper connections.

The author draws out another interesting North American connection with Costanzo’s Matamoros cult:

Interestingly, one of Constanzo’s chief recruiting tools for his blood cult was apparently the 1987 horror film ‘The Believers’, starring Martin Sheen.

“…gang members told police that they were initiated into the religious ways of the cult through repeated viewings of the movie, The Believers.

“Young Serafin Hernandez Garcia told authorities it was his favorite film.

“There were startling similarities between Constanzo’s gang and the evil cult portrayed in The Believers.  Most significantly, both groups practiced human sacrifice to attain protection and power from the gods…

                                             (Hell Ranch, Clifford L. Linedecker, pgs. 95-96)

The obsession Constanzo’s cult had with ‘The Believers’ is very interesting.  The film concerns a police psychiatrist (Sheen) who becomes involved in a series of child murders occurring in New York City.  The children are killed in a highly ritualistic fashion and it is soon revealed that a cult with high society connections (including ties to the police) is behind the killings.

Even more significantly, ‘The Believers’ was written my Mark Frost, who would go on to create the legendary TV series ‘Twin Peak’s with maverick filmmaker David Lynch.  ….  I consider “Twin Peaks” one of the finest accounts of magick to ever be released.  I’ve written heavily on the TV series here, the viewing of which I compared to an initiation into an occult society…. Frost’s script demonstrates both an accurate depiction of occult rites in addition to compelling links between the occult and high society.

The author of “Latin American High Weirdness” speculates that Jim Jones was also actually an occultist, citing this first hand account  (Levenda’s Sinister Forces Book II, 2011)

…. Jones began to speak of revolution, and of Jesus as a socialist. He began to gradually mock and vilify the God of the Jews, the ‘Sky God’ as he called him, and to identify Jehovah with satanic forces bent on the destruction of humanity.  It was pure neo-Nazism, except it was so convoluted that most of his followers would never have recognized it for what it was… the Nazi ideologists of the Third Reich had reinterpreted the bible in such a way that the God of the Israelites was Satan.  This has become standard theology in such racist organizations in America as the Christian Identity movement.

“Lucifer was the ‘light-bringer,’ and intent on delivering humanity from the clutches of the evil Jehovah.  This is also a Gnostic belief, as demonstrated in the scriptures uncovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945.  In this system, the Serpent in the Garden of Eden was the true God, who wanted to deliver the human race from the blind Creator God, the Demiurge who wanted Adam and Eve as his personal slaves…

This multiplicity of gods with Biblical genealogy is what gave rise to the theology of the Process Church of the Final Judgment… This form of Gnosticism also influenced Charles Manson, and he began to identify himself with Abraxas, a famous Gnostic deity whose numerological equivalent is 365, the same as the number of days in the year and thus representative of time itself.   With the Nazis, the neo-Nazis, and the Christian Identity movement in the United States, Europe, and Latin America, we are experiencing a strange resurrection of first and second century Gnosticism: Gnosticism with a vengeance.