by Anastasia & Joseph Guiliani
This is the conversion story from ocultism in the Jehovah’s Witnesses to Orthodoxy, and it is not a light read. The account presented here has been edited, but reader discretion is advised. This is a strong story. We are grateful to the Guilianis for permitting us to publish it.
A Brief Pre-History of Me
I am not sure how far back in my ancestry the occultism goes. There are many stories. But MY story starts with grandparents. I have one grandfather, he is the father of both my mother and my father, but they did not know this when they met and fell in love. He was from what I can figure out, 1/4 Mediterranean from his grandmother who was called Zenobia (spelling?) Pharos (but who is recorded as Mary Eva and the “s” was dropped from her name)- and he had a baby photo of his “catholic” baptism. But he was a hard, angry man and he cursed God and blasphemed and lived a loose immoral life.
My mother was an indiscretion of his youth that nearly put him in jail, but family in the small town Police Department managed to blame another. However, this meant my mother grew up believing she was the product of rape by the town drunk. Her mother abandoned her, leaving her with the aunt who raised my grandmother when her own mother died when she was only 5 (so my mother’s Great Aunt.) This was 1928 and my mother’s childhood was colored by the Great Depression and WWII amidst poverty and shame. But even with that my mother was actually a gifted person, intelligent, creative, artistic, quick-witted, and pretty. Her family was early Methodist/Holiness and she grew up going to Sunday School, but she was never very interested in all the Pentecostal goings on.
My Grandfather was married to a Roman Catholic woman who already had one son and as the story goes, neither were faithful to their marriage vows. He met my other grandmother during one of the times he and his wife were separated. My grandmother was a young nurse and she decided she was going to reform this man and even though he would not seek an annulment from the Church, she “took up house-keeping” with him and she quickly had her first two children, my aunt first and my father second. When my father was born the doctor who did the home delivery and his wife offered to adopt him because they were childless. But my grandmother refused, even though my grandfather would have gladly given him away. In those days it was harder for a single woman to raise a son than a daughter, and my grandmother had already ruined her reputation by living with a married man. My father was born in 1936, in the middle of the Great Depression. And his childhood knew poverty and shame also, perhaps even more than my mother’s did. He grew up out in the country ostracized from the rest of the family with 5 siblings. My Father was very cunningly smart, highly intelligent but he had a devious edge to his brilliance. He was a problem-child for his teachers and he was physically “disciplined” after the fashion of the day, which would today be considered abusive.
My grandmother, my father’s mother, was involved with Jehovah’s Witnesses back to the 1930’s when Judge Rutherford was claiming to get his information from angels and channeling Pastor Russell the founder. She was secretly baptized in 1940. My grandfather’s reaction was violent and deadly. He broke down the doors of the Kingdom Hall and carried his children out over his shoulders while my grandmother meekly followed behind for the 12 mile walk. It ended the night she sneaked out to go to a meeting with out the children to find him holding a rifle on them when she got home. My father remembers being lined up against the wall and standing there for so long he fell asleep. My grandmother continued to take Watchtowers from Jehovah’s Witnesses for years lining the egg baskets that my grandparents sold in a road-side produce stand, but she never went back to a meeting. My grandmother had all of the old books from the early Bible Student years when Charles Taze Russell was in charge of the religion and it was very much influenced by Freemasons and Illuminati conspiracies. My father grew up without any formal religion.
Behind all this was the “family secret”. The family line actually went back to European royalty through my grandfather’s paternal side and was traceable without a break back to about 1600, and then was a bit more tenuous but still went back to Charlemagne. And with it came a fair share of incest and immorality and corruption, but what came to affect me so profoundly- the genetic disease Porphyria*. It is what made Mad King George mad. And also had roots in the tales of vampires and werewolves of times past. And so the time bomb started ticking for a woman and a man who were about to meet in a factory and fall in love despite an 8 year age difference.
They met at work and my father fell in love immediately but it took longer to convince my mother, they were however married within 6 months. (Genetic Sexual Attraction is actually a thing I am told by my doctor, a Geneticist.) They had similar pain and rejection and a lot in common. More than they could have guessed. I do not fault them for falling in love. In another circumstance they may have been beloved siblings comforting each other through a hard life. When they found out, I can only imagine the devastation! They went to a Roman Catholic priest and asked to be married and he not only refused to do so, but told them that any children they might have would not be baptized either for they would be “an abomination”. The got married by a Justice-of-the-Peace a few towns over who did not speak English.
So because of the family displeasure at their choice to get married and the public shame that was about to come out if they stayed there, my father enlisted in the Air Force. They followed his career all over the US and had a happy early married life. In Southern California, my father was approached by a Jehovah’s Witness in the door-to-door preaching work and he remembered the Watchtowers his mother had kept hidden and with the experience with the Catholic priest still fresh, he accepted a Bible study from them. The Jehovah’s Witnesses were thrilled. especially when they found out who they had found after researching my family’s genealogy! My parents told them about being half-siblings and Jehovah’s Witnesses embraced it because of the implications for the bloodline. They were encouraged to have children who would undoubtably according to the Jehovah’s Witnesses be God’s chosen ones! But after 9 years they were still not able to have children and my mother went to an Air Force doctor to find out she had pre-malignant cysts on her ovaries and needed to have them removed. They were again devastated, but the surgeon was able to save 1/4 of one ovary for her and in just 6 weeks after her surgery, she got pregnant with me.
My father became involved in the occult aspects of the (Jehovah’s Witnesses) religion. Egyptology and channeling angels and demons and Masonic stuff. There was a book about a demon who had lived in a materialized body at the time of the flood and he had had a wife and family. My father frequently ‘taught’ me things of this dark nature with the proviso that I did not tell anyone at the Kingdom Hall because they were not mature enough to understand it. If some “daytime” rule of the Jehovah’s Witnesses chafed him he would ignore it in private saying that it was made for the weak ones not ‘us’. I was told that it was Jehovah’s Will that the sun dominated the day and the lesser luminary dominates the night. So during the daytime we worshiped Jehovah and at night we worshiped Lucifer. And Lucifer was once an angel of Light and Beauty and could still look like one.
It was just a family feud of sorts and dad taught that when hell was emptied in Revelation that Jehovah would reconcile with this Son too. He said Lucifer was the Prodigal Son. And only the 144,000 would be invited to the feast to welcome him back. Of course my father believed he was one of them. My grandmother knew these things also. My mother knew about some of it, but she was not a very ‘faithful’ witness, so she was not privileged with the info like I was. At least, I do not think she was, I would like to give her that much. It is still painful to me to remember my mother as the unloving woman she was to me. But even in the end, when she died alone, I did not know why she allowed me to be used like that or why she did not love me.
I was groomed from a baby to be trained to take my place at my father’s side as his aide. He told me that we were Nephilim, of the demonic bloodline, and this was the reason we had Porphyria*. There were a few others in every congregation and I would see them occasionally at picnics and gatherings, sometimes at clearings in the woods around our home. There was one man who claimed he was the reincarnated Jeremiah. This was in southern New Jersey in the late 60’s early 70’s. My father’s mentor was from California and supposedly taught my father everything he knew in the late 1950’s before I was born. Some years later as a young adult this mentor took me in also for a few years when I lived in the southern California desert in the 80’s.
*About Porphyria
Just some additional explanation about the genetic disease I was born with, that Jehovah’s Witnesses felt was a mark of Nephilim bloodline. Both my parents also had Porphyria. My parents were consanguinous, half-siblings who were married and had two children. This made our family very special to Jehovah’s Witnesses. Porphyria is a genetic disease of blood metabolism that primarily does not allow the proper binding of iron molecules to cells to produce heme for hemoglobin. I have used a wheelchair and various other mobility aids since I was 15 years old. I am 53 now. Every Porphryia attack gets harder to recover from at my age. Environmental and chemical triggers are inescapable as everything and anything that engages the liver’s P-450 cytochrome pathway is a trigger, including sunlight and 80% of all prescribed medications, common foods, and environmental toxins.
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