EVER SINCE first writing this article some two year ago, and then others like it, Pentecostals and Charismatics alike have protested my outing Charles Fox Parham as a Freemason on the basis that he was apparently no longer attending the local lodge when he started his “Full Gospel” ministry. How adorable. Mostly, they just succumb to trolling YouTube videos and flinging monkey poo in the comments section. The founder of Pentecostalism was a spook. He was a spook of the worst kind because he was also a Wizard. In Scriptural terms that makes him a Balaam.
The problem with exposing “tongue-speak” is the terrible headache of cognitive dissonance that muddies every possible attempt at an adult conversation. “Tongue-speak” is yet one more piece of baggage which we can throw onto the post mud-flood deception. Archeology. Paleontology. Astronomy. Psychology. Rocket science. Pentecostalism. It’s only slightly more than a hundred years old. It’s also how millions of people all over the flat, motionless plane communicate with and experience their elohim. Today, even Hollywood is embracing it.
And they’ve been using Mk-Ultra celebrities like Katy Perry to dole it out.
Spirituality is a funny thing. The Christians of Antioch embraced the Mysteries and then stamped Jesus for approval from the very beginning. Kind of like how Katy Perry has Jesus tattooed onto her arm. It’s how they initiate the kids into the Mysteries of Christ. Mm-hmm, I just went there. It’s 2020 and I’ve probably written nearly 600 articles, many on the topic of occult origins. If you haven’t already, I suggest you read my papers on the following. The cross. The church steeple. Sunday. The Trinity. Birthdays. Isaac Newton. The immortal soul. Globe earth. Space. The Copernican Revolution. The double-coiling helix. Unicorns. Dinosaurs. Starbucks Coffee. Walt Disney World. If you want to know how the spiritual deception works, then you probably need to look no further than the Temple Mount hoax. Temple hoax. Also, a guest writer recently wrote this incredible paper on the origins of Christmas. Sun worship.
There she is. Katy Perry. aka, Kathryn Elizabeth Hudson. The preacher’s daughter who took the taboo out of kissing another girl and liking it.
A decade or so ago, the Dark Horse singer told the spook-run Rolling Stone Magazine, “Speaking in tongues is as normal to me as ‘Pass the salt..’ It’s a secret, direct prayer language to God.” Mind you, this was back when she was set up or pimped out, or whatever, to Illuminati poster-boy Russell Brand. She further added that her dad usually spoke in tongues while her mom played interpreter. How adorable.
Here’s where the conversation gets especially difficult. Calling “tongue-speak” a spiritual deception is essentially like telling someone they’ve been going about having sex wrong. That thigh they’ve been groping in the dark all those years isn’t their wife. As if the flat-earth revelation didn’t expose a hundred years of planetary prophets in the charismatic church, mm-hmm, Yahuah’s raising up of a Torah-observant people put that rotting corpse into the grave. Yahushua made it pointedly clear that the least in his kingdom would be one “who sets aside one of the least of these commands and teaches others accordingly.” Matthew 5:19. Charismatics are the most lawless congregations I’ve ever encountered. People all over the world climb into their prayer closet and blabber incoherently and then feel revitalized while doing it. Backed with the adhesive of Sha’ul’s grace gospel, this tends to cement the notion that they have a special radio receiver with Yahuah. They’re good.
Cognitive dissonance is strong with tongue-speak.
Modern day tongue-speak finds its first apparition in the early morning hours of New Years’ Day, 1901, when the forty students at Bethel Bible College in Topeka, Kansas, along with their teacher, 27-year-old Methodist Holiness minister and Freemason Charles Fox Parham, were desperate to experience the presence and power of the Holy Spirit. True to their background in the Wesleyan Holiness movement, which emerged from 19th-century Methodism, they collectively agreed that the baptism of the Holy Spirit took place subsequent to conversion. After weeks of study in the book of Acts, they took their conclusions one step further. Speaking in a foreign tongue was the sign of Spirit baptism.
We are told that a young woman named Agnes Ozman was desperate to receive her own Spirit baptism. With the sun still dawning upon the 20th century, Ozman asked Parham to lay hands upon her while she prayed a benediction, which might be found in Hebrews 13:20-21. Parham agreed. What happened next would alter the course of church history. Parham and his forty students rediscovered—seemingly lost to the church since the apostolic age—the gift of speaking in Biblical tongues.
In his book, ‘With Signs Following—The Latter-Day Pentecostal Revival,’ Stanley Frodsham quotes Miss Ozman as having testified:
“…it was as if hands were laid upon my head that the Holy Spirit fell upon me and I began to speak in tongues, glorifying God. I talked several languages, and it was clearly manifest when a new dialect was spoken. I had the added joy and glory my heart longed for, and a depth of the presence of the Lord within that I had never known before. It was as if rivers of living water were proceeding from my innermost being.”
Parham later recounted:
“I laid my hands upon her and prayed. I had scarcely completed three dozen sentences when a glory fell upon her, a halo seemed to surround her head and face, and she began speaking the Chinese language and was unable to speak English for three days. When she tried to write in English to tell us of her experience, she wrote the Chinese.”
I have added the only known photograph of Agnes Ozman, and as the caption above shows (probably part of a newsletter clipping), it was taken nearly four decades later—the year of her death. In 1901, her colleagues reported a halo surrounding her head. Also, the Chinese language, and only Chinese, exploded from her lips. This is important because, for Parham and his students, their studies into the spiritual gift led them to the conclusion that a tongue was an actual foreign language. Not “tongue-speak” as the Pentecostal and Charismatic church knows it today. Hence, Chinese. History will note that Jonathan Edwards, Charles Hodge, Charles Spurgeon, and B.B. Warfield (Sigh, I know) all believed the gift of speaking in Biblical tongues involved another human language. Look, I’m not interested in human tradition or man-made doctrine. My readers should be made well aware by now that I identify with Natsarim thinking and no longer consider myself a Christian of Antioch. But I think the point should at least be made that the universal church as a whole has long believed tongues to be human language. This would most certainly line up with the opinion of the Christian church fathers. Gregory of Nazianzus (c. 329–390) wrote of it: “They spoke with foreign tongues, and not those of their native land; and the wonder was great, a language spoken by those who had not learned it. And the sign is to them that believe not, and not to them that believe…” Parham and company would thereafter attempt to follow the natural conclusions of early Christian belief.
Ozman’s halo story manifested into some sort of ground swell, because not long after, Parham and thirty-four other students began speaking in unknown tongues. More than twenty languages were reportedly spoken. Russian, Japanese. Bulgarian. French, Bohemian. Norwegian. Hungarian. Italian. And Spanish. Charles Parham himself claimed to speak in Swedish “as well as other languages.” Word of this new Pentecost spread.
Not long thereafter, African-American holiness pastor Lucy Farrow (1851–1911), niece of black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, received the gift of tongues. African-American holiness pastor William J. Seymour (May 2, 1870 – September 28, 1922) did too. In 1906 an estimated 13,000 people began speaking in tongues on Bonnie Brae Street in Los Angeles, California, under the ministry of Farrow, and by 1909, another 50,000 had experienced their Spirit baptism under Seymour’s Azusa Street revival.
Soon, everybody wanted in on the action .
The above picture is of Maria Woodworth Etter (1844-1924), the “Trance Evangelist.” The faith healer was considered a precursor to the Pentecostal movement, and was therefore welcomed with open arms into the church. It would take volumes of books to document these snake-oil pimps and peddlers, but let’s just consider Etter for the moment, because she’s a piece of work. Unlike Ozman, who was probably ambushed and then coerced into a picture on her way to church, the Trance Evangelist or whatever she prefers to be called had a particular fondness for her own portrait. A simple search on Google produced several images, and at various ages, where she displayed the strange inkling for the Baphomet “as above, so below” gesture. Really, the woman was a serial abuser. Nothing to see here. My entire point being, Maria Woodworth Etter insisted in her auto-biography, Signs and Wonders, that tongue-speak be taken away from Charles Parham’s credit, and given to the spirit of his precursors.
The modern Pentecostal movement was born.
Pentecostal historian Vinson Synan writes, “Ozman’s experience thus became the prototype experience for all the millions of Pentecostals who were to follow.” In short, Charles Parham had lit a match and set a forest ablaze. He christened this holy fire the “Apostolic Faith Movement.”
On January 7, 1901, a rather confident Charles Parham promised the Topeka State Journal: “The Lord will give us the power of speech to talk to the people of the various nations without having to study them in schools.
To the Kansas City Times, dated January 27, 1901, Parham claimed:
“A part of our labor will be to teach the church the uselessness of spending years of time preparing missionaries for work in foreign lands when all they have to do is ask God for power.”
And then on May 31, 1901, Parham told the Hawaiian Gazette:
“There is no doubt that at this time they will have conferred on them the ‘gift of tongues,’ if they are worthy and seek it in faith, believing they will thus be made able to talk to the people whom they choose to work among in their own language, which will, of course, be an inestimable advantage. The students of Bethel College do not need to study in the old way to learn the languages. They have them conferred on them miraculously… [being] able to converse with Spaniards, Italians, Bohemians, Hungarians, Germans, and French in their own language. I have no doubt various dialects of the people of India and even the language of the savages of Africa will be received during our meeting in the same way. I expect this gathering to be the greatest since the days of Pentecost.”
The Hawaiian Gazette reports the following:
Envoys to the Heathen Should Have Gift of Tongues
TOPEKA, May 20—Rev. Charles F. Parham, of the “College of Bethel,” at Topeka, and his followers are preparing to give the people of the churches some new work along the line of missionary endeavor.
His plan is to send among the heathen, persons who have been blessed with the “gift of tongues”—a gift which, he says, no others have ever had conferred upon them since apostolic times. His missionaries, as he points out, will have the great advantages of having the languages of the various peoples among whom they work miraculously conferred upon them and will not be put to the trouble of learning them in laborious way by which they are acquired by other prospective missionaries.
“Our summer Bible school will begin in Topeka June 10,” said Rev. Mr. Parham last night. “It will be held on the campus of the college. We are expecting thousands of ministers, evangelists and other people from all parts of the United States who desire to become missionaries to attend. There is no doubt that at this time they will have conferred on them the ‘gift of tongues,’ if they are worthy and seek it in faith, believing. They will thus be made able to talk to people whom they choose to work among in their own language, which will, of course, be an inestimable advantage.
“The students of Bethel College do not need to study in the old way to learn the languages. They have them conferred upon them miraculously. Different ones have already been enabled to converse with Spaniards, Italians, Bohemians, Hungarians, Germans, and French in their own language. I have no doubt that knowledge of Chinese, Japanese, the various dialects of the people of India and even the language of the savages of Africa will be received during our meeting in the same way. I expect this gathering to be the greatest since the days of Pentecost.”
Here the Hawaiian Gazette concludes:
“There is always a great deal about hell and damnation, the gift of the tongues, divine healing, etc., in his sermons. He claims that he and his disciples have received all the gifts that Christ conferred upon His earliest disciples. Last night’s sermon was of the usual order. Rev. Mr. Parham is very optimistic concerning the future prospects of his sect. He says it is growing rapidly. He calls his followers “Believers.”
“There are 500 Believers in Topeka,” he said, “and there are already thousands in other parts of the United States and the world. I receive letters every day from people inquiring whether it is true that the gifts of tongues and healing have been conferred again. Many are skeptical at first, but are convinced when the evidence is presented to them. The conferring of the gift of tongues upon us is, I am sure, the first step in the evangelization of the world.”
What followed is a historical embarrassment of Biblical proportions. For starters, Parham, Ozman, and their contemporaries at Bethel Bible College in Topeka, Kansas, never actually experienced the supernatural sign they were seeking. Parham’s promise failed miserably. That embarrassing fact became painfully obvious as missionaries willfully evaded language schools and arrived at their “tongue-gifted” countries. Nobody understood them—nobody. Not a lick. The miraculous ability to speak in authentic foreign languages, just as the Apostles did on the day of Pentecost, was never repeated by anyone involved. Rather—and very much unlike the explosive Messianic movement in Acts—the natives of those foreign countries listened in upon the ravings of lunatics and mad men.
Charismatic authors Jack Hayford and David Moore confess this awkward miscalculation when they write: “Sadly, the idea of xenoglossalalic tongues [i.e. foreign languages] would later prove an embarrassing failure as Pentecostal workers went off to mission fields with their gift of tongues and found their hearers did not understand them.”
Parham’s Apostolic Faith missionaries soon returned, bitterly shipwrecked. Alfred G. Garr (1875-1944) and his wife’s expedition to the Far East, both of whom were dead set on preaching the gospel in ‘the Indian and Chinese languages,’ failed miserably, and Lucy Farrow, the “Mother of Pentecostalism,” returned from Africa after a seven-month trip. Her alleged claim that she preached to the natives in their own ‘Kru language’ went unchecked.
In his book, Vision of the Disinherited: The Making of American Pentecostalism, Robert Mapes Anderson writes:
“S.C. Todd of the Bible Missionary Society investigated eighteen Pentecostals who went to Japan, China, and India ‘expecting to preach to the natives in those countries in their own tongue,’ and found that by their own admission ‘in no single instance have [they] been able to do so.’ As these and other missionaries returned in disappointment and failure, Pentecostals were compelled to rethink their original view of speaking in tongues.”
This should come as no surprise, but “The Topeka Daily Capital reported that not everyone at the school embraced the new experience. In an interview with the newspaper, S.J. Riggins said of Parham and his fellow students, ‘I believe the whole of them are crazy.’”
Even their stories don’t match up. Parham stated that Ozman did not speak in English for three days after her experience, but Ozman reported praying in English after only one day. Parham furthermore took credit for directing his students to the book of Acts before their history-making. Ozman however contradicted that claim, asserting she had no part of any bible-study assignment by Parham prior to her tongues speaking experience. Actually, it is Ozman, according to her account, who pointed students to Acts 2 in answer to their questions about her glossolalic experience, and not Parham.
Furthermore, Historian Martin E. Marty writes:
“Like all such mythically cast stories, these had certain features that remain open to question. In an earlier stratum of testimony Miss Ozman referred to having spoken in tongues three weeks before New Year’s Day, a less neat date, but one which others corroborated. She also claimed that she realized the significance of her speaking only later, but it is known that Parham had instructed her in advance to look for precisely that sign.”
There is another regrettable error which I must not fail in mentioning. The Chinese lettering from Ozman’s halo story was released to various newspapers, including the Los Angeles Daily Times, fully confident it would prove their conviction. The fruit of Ozman’s Spirit baptism is completely unintelligible, resembling no known language—nor is it resembling a cryptic alien or angelic language which might be complimentary of the ethereal realm.
Though Ozman never recanted of her halo and Chinese story, an alien tongue certainly swept the world—not quite unlike the plot to Invasion of the Body Snatchers—and this she felt a tinge of responsibility for. The confession from the woman who had already awakened the halo in tens of thousands fell on deaf ears. She could not find anyone so much as willing to publish her words. Writing in The Latter Rain Evangel of January 1909 she lamented: “Some time ago I tried but failed to have an article printed which I wrote calling attention to what I am sure God showed me was error. The article maintained that tongues was not the only evidence of the Spirit’s Baptism.” Poor Ozman. Perhaps she didn’t realize that newspapers are owned and operated by intelligence communities. It is their business to create news, to wave the wand of alchemy, and incite the reader into the ever-developing psychodrama. Ozman added: “For a while after the baptism I got into spiritual darkness, because I did as I see so many others are doing these days, rested and reveled in tongues and other demonstrations instead of resting alone in God.” Unfortunately for Ozman, it appears as though cognitive dissonance won the day.
The father of American Pentecostalism, Charles Fox Parham, began his career as a Freemason. For the remainder of his life he endorsed the Ku Klux Klan spook operation, and did so as late as 1927, two years before his death. 33-degree Freemason Albert Pike was a high ranking official of that order. Within those intervening years Parham would be stricken with scandal, including accusations of sodomy, which he was even arrested for. In 1904 Nettie Smith, a nine-year-old girl, died because her father refused medical treatment in favor of Parham’s healing. As a result, he was forced to leave Kansas for Texas. Parham was further riddled with doctrinal illiteracy. For example, he taught that those who received the spirit baptism by speaking in tongues would make up the bride of Christ, with a partial rapture composed of tongue speakers. Those tongue speakers, by the way, would uphold a special place of eternal authority.
It is inconceivable to imagine the twelve Apostles present in Jerusalem’s upper room falling into such salacious scandal, and I have only so far spoken of Pentecostalism’s father, Parham. What we have before us is an unfolding drama—an endless line-up of falling dominoes. It is strange indeed to contrast a Spirit then and now who, when seeking Yahuah’s kingdom vessels, would choose a Freemason and Klan member and various occultists for the later. In the little upper room where the Apostles first experienced the gift of tongues, according to Acts, the assembly was breached among the gentiles, and therefore the lost sheep of Israel, through a stunning display of human languages. Almost two-thousand years later, in a tiny classroom at Bethel Bible College in Topeka, Kansas, the oldest religion of all, the Mystery religion, was distributed to a new class of the initiated.
Noel