Doug Riggs, Satanic Ritual Abuse, and Nephilim Conspiracies

Late last night I received a cryptic note from Pastor Doug Riggs containing three hyperlinks and signed only with the words “Proverbs 18:13.” I got out my Bible and looked up the passage to see what the good pastor was trying to tell me. “To answer before listening—that is folly and shame.” It appeared that I was being rebuked, but for what? To find the answer, I needed to check out Pastor Doug’s links. What I found was so very sad and so very disturbing.

Yesterday we heard from Himmler’s Crusade author Christopher Hale that “there are consequences to ideas,” and today we see some of those consequences. The idea in question is—what else?—that the Nephilim have a plan to create genetic hybrids with human beings. Doug Riggs believes the Nephilim are the masterminds behind Satanic Ritual Abuse, a long-debunked scare from the 1980s that imagined satanic cults engaging in child molestation. There is no evidence whatsoever that any organized satanic cult ritually abused children.

By contrast, one of the largest perpetrators of child abuse was the Catholic Church, which hid priestly sex abuse for decades.

I had never heard of Pastor Doug Riggs before last night, even though he apparently practices his ministry in Syracuse, New York, near where I grew up. Riggs runs a ministry called Morning Star Testimony Church (the name refers to speaking out about Lucifer) dedicated to advocating an apocalyptic worldview preaching the imminent End Times and offering “therapy” for alleged survivors of Satanic Ritual Abuse. According to fellow Nephilim researcher Doug Woodward, Riggs’ congregation is made up almost exclusively of those who believe themselves to be the victims of Satanic Ritual Abuse and subsequent Dissociative Identity Disorder.

Dissociative Identity Disorder (formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder) allegedly implants a Nephilim personality that can emerge to take control of the abused’s body.

Although according to sources Riggs does not hold a license to practice mental health counseling, his title as pastor allows him to offer spiritual counseling. Many of those who have encountered his “therapy” have been scarred by what they saw. One survivor started a blog to discuss what the blog calls a “cult” around Riggs and offers deeply disturbing details of what went on behind church doors when Riggs preached in Oklahoma:

I was involved in his church in Tulsa, Oklahoma during the 1990's. I was only a pre-teen at the time, but I still remember the screaming, the exorcisms, the hand-drawn diagrams showing how each one of the congregational families were linked to shadowy organizations that wanted to subject us to unspeakable horrors. I remember hours and hours of a charismatic, intelligent, physically imposing man filling my head with fear of the most absolute kind. Through his lessons, my world grew darker. My family isolated themselves from their relatives.

These shadowy organizations are of course part and parcel of the conspiracy handbook, parallel to the Freemason-Illuminati-Templar conspiracies. Only this time, instead of receiving veneration for their secret knowledge the challenges Church teachings, the shadowy organizations are seen as in league with Satan for the same reason.

In fact, according to Riggs, the Freemasons are in league with the Nephilim and are currently in charge of the United States government and its intelligence agencies. In turn, the Nephilim-Freemasons are masterminding a nationwide pattern of child sacrifices as part of a master plan to bring about the End Times. He is not alone in this, and a fellow researcher into “Satanic Ritual Abuse” named Russ Dizdar goes even further in casting all of the usual bogeymen of fringe history conspiracies as agents of a long-running project to abuse children in Satan’s name.

Riggs wanted me to read a chapter from Doug Woodward’s book Power Quest Book Two that describes Woodward’s conspiracy theory that the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele was active in the United States. Woodward reported that he did not find Riggs to be a cult leader and that his congregation was not a cult, merely socially conservative and strictly adherent to biblical truth. I cannot speak to whether Riggs runs a true cult.

Woodward and Riggs know one another (and L.A. Marzulli) and work together to promote conspiracy theories involving Satan, the Nephilim, and various secret organizations, so Woodward’s testimony is not unbiased. Both assert that Josef Mengele was responsible for the satanic abuse many of Riggs’ congregants claim to have experienced, and the congregants assert they remember working with Mengele from, in some cases, the age of 18 months. Riggs has “helped” his congregants realize that they are the unacknowledged children of European royalty, and that their abuse occurred because Satan intended to fulfill the prophecy of Psalm 2:2 that the kings of the earth should conspire against God. From all across America, but especially in Tulsa, Oklahoma and Syracuse, New York, the secret children of European royalty were deposited in American homes, princelings whom Satan, the Freemasons, and the Nazis want to convert to Satanism.

Obviously, if this were true there should be some evidence in the form of royal pregnancies, DNA, travel records…anything, really.

Riggs provided me with links to a five-hour documentary in which he interviews several of these “survivors,” who explain how they are the children of kings and queens of the “Germanic” royal bloodline of Europe. Four alone claim to be Windsors, and one believers her self the bastard daughter of the former Queen of Greece and an unidentified Jewish financier. Woodward, in turn, asserts that this secret, sacred bloodline—the same Holy Bloodline variously attributed in conspiracy literature to the secret children of Christ, survivors of Atlantis, or lizard people—has been the focus of Nephilim activity since the dawn of time, corrupted and controlled as part of a global cult dedicated to power:

On the outward level, these royals may be Catholic, Protestant, or Marxist atheist; while behind the scenes, they are avowedly caught up in the cult of Lucifer. Luciferians, Rosicrucians, and the highest degree of Freemasonry (perhaps properly labeled the ‘illuminists’) all drink from the same tainted golden goblet. They quest for perfect knowledge and ultimate power. They seek to ‘manage humanity’ whether they see themselves leaning toward fascism or Marxism.

I cannot begin to express how deeply sad Doug Riggs’ video makes me. The individuals depicted in that video are clearly suffering, but Riggs has convinced them that their suffering derives from secret powers beyond their control and that their modest American lives are frauds that removed them from the palaces and castles that were their birthright. He also told them, and Woodward concurs, that the parents they grew up with were all Satanists who abused them at the behest of the Illuminati. Doug Riggs, of course, has no evidence for any of this beyond psychologically-dubious “recovered” memories and his own unshakeable belief in global conspiracies. These people are suffering, and Riggs has convince them that their pain is not in vain, that their suffering is part of a battle against Satan, and that with his help they can fight on the side of the angels.

L. A. Marzulli explained the “master plan” of the Nephilim, those tricky creatures for whom there is no evidence they ever existed outside the imagination of the writer of Genesis 6:1-4. They are an article of faith, not a conclusion from evidence. Here is how Marzulli expands Genesis 6:4 (in which the Sons of God mate with the daughters of men) into a global conflagration centered on the Nephilim having sex with random human women, those prepared for the task through Satanic Ritual Abuse, which makes them into incubators for demons (or Nephilim or whatever):

Added to this was the startling information given to me by Doug Riggs in regard to Satanic Ritual abuse, where the Nephilim mothers are now non-blood lines. This duplicates the Genesis 6 paradigm exactly. I believe that the hybrids will be used to control and give orders to satanic super soldiers, those men and women whose personalities have been demonically split, as Russ Dizdar informs us in his book, Rise of the Satanic Super Soldiers.

Yes, “bloodlines.” As in the royal bloodlines of Europe. Riggs, apparently unable to plausibly maintain that everyone he meets is a child of European royalty, has now expanded the Nephilim’s reach beyond the European royal blood.

This is real harm that is preventing Riggs’ congregants and other believers from getting the real help they need to find the true source of their suffering, and it derives from the same mixture of fringe history, uncritical use of ancient texts, and paranoid conspiracies that animates so much at the outer limits of history—ancient astronautics, Bloodline-Templar conspiracies, UFO abductions, giantology, etc. Worse, fringe psychology—extreme, unscientific claims about multiple personalities—is folded into the conspiracy as a “scientific” support for the idea of satanic personality implants sitting within our brains.

When I first heard about the “Nephilim theory” and L. A. Marzulli’s strange ideas, I thought it was just another flavor of fringe idiocy. Now I see that it is dangerous and is causing real and lasting harm to people whom these theorists have convinced in the name of Jesus that they are in thrall to Satan. And the media contribute to this every time they air a “documentary” that tells lies about ancient astronauts, Holy Bloodline conspiracies, and UFOs—all topics that seem silly to outsiders but which the faithful accept as a revelation of the secret conspiratorial forces that control their lives, absolve them from responsibility for their actions, and explain their sadness and suffering in terms that make their pain noble, part of a titanic struggle against Satan rather than a mundane encounter with the banality of evil.