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Prophet
Seeking
Pryor Experience: Former Satanic priest Eric Pryor, now a minister at San Jose's Jubilee Christian Center, shows the devil's playthings
The one-time bad boy of Satanism has finally arrived
By Bob Hansen
It starts quietly, the laugh. There's a silly smile, a beatific grin that's supposed to reflect blessedness but instead looks vaguely maniacal. Soon, the woman in the front row of San Jose's Jubilee Christian Center is openly laughing. People sitting near her, mostly white middle-class types, are starting to cast sideways glances.
What is with this woman? This is church, and there's a sermon going on, for God's sake.
Witch Watch
Actually, this is what the Reverend Eric Pryor calls a "prophetic service," the "Protestant equivalent of an exorcism."
You may have heard of Reverend Pryor.
Back in 1990, he made headlines when he rallied the Pagan, Satanic and gay communities against Dr. Larry Lea, a prominent Texas televangelist. Lea had come to San Francisco on Halloween to summon Christian warriors from across the nation in an effort to fight what he termed the forces of Satan--drug addicts, gay people and the sexually promiscuous. At the time, Pryor was serving as the High Priest of San Francisco Satanists and head of the New Earth Temple, the garage band equivalent of a Devil worshipping ministry.
Then a funny thing happened.
After organizing the widely covered "public cursing," during which an effigy of Lea was burned and stabbed, Pryor converted to born-again Christianity. Just like that! Later, over coffee with Rev. Dick Bernal, the head of Jubilee Christian church, Pryor decided to join the forces of God. The move earned him the wrath of Bay Area Pagans, who labeled him a turncoat. Some still believe that he infiltrated their society in order to collect data on them.
On this Saturday night however, he's waging his never-ending battle against his former bud, the Devil. But this woman is a distraction with her nutty laughter. Not that she's laughing at him. She's just, well, happy. Some people cry; she laughs. Who can predict how God will work his stuff?
Eric strolls through the aisles, occasionally looking over at the woman as he works the crowd. He is dressed entirely in black, his usual attire, and his trademark cowboy boots adorn his feet. He has an angular face, and is whippet thin. Behind a slight mustache is $20,000 worth of dental work, one of the few gifts he says he gave himself since joining with Jubilee.
As he approaches those ready to Receive, he thrusts out his arm and forms a halt sign with his hand, stopping just before their foreheads. "Take it!" he shouts, "just take it!"
The person being yelled at, or "slain by the Lord," is supposed to fall down. You're not supposed to actually make yourself fall; the deal is God enters you and then you collapse. But people don't seem to understand that. A few stagger backwards, but refuse to go down.
"Take it!" he yells to a still standing woman..
Others flop backwards on command--into the hands of two of Pryor's handlers, whose job it is to catch them. But sometimes they miss. One middle-aged man backsteps onto the feet of the lady behind him, causing her to wince in pain. A few remain sprawled on the carpeted floor, their eyes closed shut, wondering probably just how long to lay there.
This is a long sermon, after all.
Most self consciously stumble to their feet after a few minutes, looking slightly embarrassed. One man appears to fall asleep. Another guy seems on the verge of an epiphany of sorts; but instead reaches into his soiled black vests, retrieves a purple Tootsie Pop, and pops it in his mouth.
Meanwhile, two camera men standing on raised platforms swivel mounted camcorders and track Pryor's every move, projecting his image on two big screens near the stage.
Pryor seems in his element--in front of a crowd, the camera rolling, and people stuffing "love offerings" into several white buckets making their way through the pews.
The one-time bad boy of Satanism has finally arrived.
Now if he could only complete his court-ordered probation--the result of two felony wife abuse convictions last year--everything might be okay.
Pryor doesn't take the stage at Jubilee very often. His thing these days is traveling around the country, preaching and teaching about the ways of the occult. His perspective is that of a former insider. He bills himself as an expert on all things concerning Satan, Paganism and occult practices. His goal, he says, is to "dismantle the tools, methods and devices of the occultic world."
He makes himself available for seminars, youth rallies, church services and teachings, including what he says is a college level seminar called "The Occult vs. The Bible." For those he can't reach in person, he offers a $12 line of "talking books," with titles such as "What is a Witch, Really?" and "My Testimony from my own Mouth." Or you can see him in the $25 video "Law enforcement Guide to Satanic Cults," a primer for police agencies looking for insight into devil lovers. Pryor has order forms for his merchandise and accepts Visa and Master Card.
Calling himself the "witch who switched," he also does what he calls "investigations" into occult practices. His target markets are law enforcement agencies and church organizations. He brings with him his special "field investigation kit," complete with white gloves, gardening tools, glass vials, baggies and a khaki-colored safari vest he sports while on location.
"I'm the only one I know of in the country who does this type of investigation," he pointed out about during an interview prior to the Saturday night sermon.
He's taken his act to places like Blytheville , Arkansas, where he went last summer to fast-track church and law enforcement officials on the community's supposed Satanic activities. Last month, he says, he was in Florida. In January, it's off to Connecticut for an eight-day gig at a church, where, he says, he'll be paid at least $20,000 for his services.
Frequently at his side is his assistant Renee, a tall, attractive woman who serves as his personal lackey, chauffeur and occasional apologist. (Pryor says he doesn't drive because of "anxiety attacks.") He barks orders at her with the casual authority of a superior officer in the military. When she arrived during one interview with a cup of coffee, he instructed her to "put more sugar in it," and she did.
Pryor isn't about to win any awards from feminist groups, that's for sure.
For one thing, he terms NOW, the National Organization of Women, "a Satanist inspired organization." In 1993, a bench warrant was issued for his arrest stemming from a dead-beat dad charge involving an ex-wife, with whom he had two sons. And then there's his controversial stance on the issue of domestic violence.
Pryor maintains that domestic violence laws are slanted against men.
Men get arrested and taken to jail, he says, even when they are the victims. And when men are the instigators, he says, the authorities neglect to look at what motivated the attack.
"Why are men snapping?" he asks.
"Statistics show women are more inclined to start the physical violence," he adds.
And he should know.
Pryor claims that his ex-wife attacked him with a knife last year in their Mountain View apartment. When the cops showed up, he says, they refused to listen to his side of the story. He was handcuffed and taken to county jail, where he spent the next five months before copping a no contest plea to two felony charges.
The incident began early on the morning of August 20, 1994. According to court documents, the police were dispatched to the apartment he shared with his then-wife Shelly Kolt to investigate a report of domestic violence.
Pryor maintains that he was the one who called 911.
When they arrived, the cops said, Pryor appeared drunk, and was holding a miniature bottle of Vodka in one hand. The police had already responded to an earlier disturbance call around 4:00 am--a call Pryor also says he made--but no arrests were made. When the cops arrived the second time several hours later, they quickly focused on an 8" knife lying on the floor. "She chased me around with that," Pryor told them.
Pryor claimed that he was the victim, and not his wife.
His wife disagreed, telling the cops that Pryor had held the knife to her throat and said, "I'm going to kill you." Then, she said, he knocked her to the ground and proceeded to hit and kick her some "20 or 30 times."
She told the cops he said, "I'm going to mess up your face so no one else will want you."
The officers believed Shelly's version of the events and arrested him on two felony counts, assault with a deadly weapon and spousal abuse. Despite a "large bump" above her left eye and assorted scrapes and bruises, she declined medical attention. Pryor's cowboy boots were booked into evidence. The cops say he became combative during the booking process, requiring the use of restraints and shackles.
In November of last year, Pryor was sentenced to eight months in county jail and three years formal probation. He was credited with 152 days of jail time already served and ordered not to have any contact with the victim, his wife.
Court records show that Pryor moved to have the marriage annulled last June, citing as the couple's separation date 8-20-94, the day of the previous year's incident. They were married, according to the records, just one month before, on 7-16-94. The marriage, Pryor says, lasted a total of 34 days.
Kolt, as it happens, is suing Jubilee Christian Center for negligence stemming from its hiring of another Jubilee minister, David Brimmer, who drew a 19-year sentence last spring for molesting young boys from the congregation. According to court documents, she is the mother (by a previous relationship) of one of the boys.
Pryor insists that he was only defending himself and had never attacked his former wife.
He says he was not drunk when the cops showed up, and denies the charge that he was holding a mini-vodka bottle when they came through the door.
"I was cleaning up the damn house when they came," he says. "Because she was a woman, I got arrested."
This past September, Shelly Kolt asked for a restraining order against Pryor. Court records say Pryor had threatened to "put a bullet through her head" if his wife left him before a "$1,000,000 book and TV deal" with the Santa Ana-based Trinity Broadcasting Network bared fruit. The deal, court records say, was only good if Pryor remained married.
Pryor denies there ever was a book deal. He remains bitter about his encounter with the police, though it did reinforce his views on the country's domestic violence laws.
"The Mountain View police failed to protect me," he says.
Terri Brown, a 37-year-old mother of two from San Jose, has just been "slain by the Lord." Well, Pryor just performed his halt sign thing, anyhow.
Minutes ago, the Reverend singled her out from the crowd and called her to the stage. God, he told her, sees her loneliness. She received the Lord and quietly fell down.
Later, she recalls the experience. "Your body just goes limp." She says she was indeed feeling lonely, and marvels at Pryor's ability to divine that. "I found him to be blatantly honest," she says. "He impressed me as someone who is generally compassionate."
Brown has been attending Jubilee for about ten years. She attended tonight's service and the proceeding $15-a-head day-long seminar, she says, because she was interested in learning about occult practices from a "good source." She found the event "very informative."
Like the happy lady, she, too, felt God's sense of humor. "There's this overwhelming desire to laugh," she says, and afterwards, "it was like driving home drunk."
"God spoke to me through him," she adds.
But not everybody is so fond of him.
Some members of the Bay Area's Wicca community are still rankled at his highly publicized conversion after the Larry Lea protests. They feel betrayed by him, saying he was the one who rallied the troops only to defect to the enemy's camp shortly thereafter.
"He belongs in a carnival," says Leah Martin, a pagan from Palo Alto.
David Lion, who says he's "about as active as you can get in the Pagan community," scoffed at the idea that Pryor had at one time embraced the Wicca religion.
"I feel that he didn't convert from anything, that he was always a part of Lea's church," he said. "We kind of feel he's a joke, like, 'What's the idiot doing now?'"
That he now is on a crusade against the very pagans he once wooed, makes things even worse. Pryor calls followers of paganism a "special interest group," and claims that child abuse is rife within the Wicca community. He says paganism can lead to Satanism, drawing the analogy between starting with marijuana and ending up hooked on heroin.
Lion strongly disputes these charges. "If someone was caught abusing a child, it would be dealt with severely," he said. "Even yelling at kids is looked down on."
Pryor says he was first introduced to paganism as a kid growing up in. Woodstock, New York. "It all got started with me as a little kid playing Halloween," he says.
He was born on July 16, 1959, "amidst the feuding of his parents," he recalls in his seven-page "autobiography in short." Seeking relief from an abusive upbringing, he writes, he often escaped to the library, where he discovered the occult section. That led him to the Earth Star Temple in Manhattan, where he spent a short period of time "exchanging sex for training in Occult Sciences."
At the age of 14, according to his uncle Paul Roefs, who pleaded with law enforcement officials to keep Pryor in jail after his '94 double felony arrest, Eric left home "to live a life of debauchery, prostitution, drugs, alcohol, violence, vandalism and Satan worship."
At 17, he joined the U.S. Army, only to be later termed unfit for duty because of "chronic LSD use." He claims to have taken in the neighborhood of 5,000 trips, using for his launching pad either acid or (psilocybin) mushrooms. After bouncing around places like Nicaragua and Arizona, he wound up in San Francisco, where he founded the Satan worshipping New Earth Temple.
The New Earth Temple, however, came to a fiery end in the parking lot of Jubilee Christian Center when he held a bonfire and burned its contents after his 1990 conversion.
It was around that time, according to his uncle's statement, that Pryor stopped seeing his psychiatrist, discontinued his medications, and returned to "alcoholism and destructive behavior."
Pryor denies his uncle's account, saying the relative was just trying to build an insanity case to help his nephew avoid a jail sentence.
That's also when he began to embrace Christianity, what he boasts as the "most highly publicized conversion in 100 years." His defection did generate a huge amount of publicity, and media attention is something he thrives on. Pryor keeps a huge portfolio of his press clippings, and he seems to seek out press coverage the way a moth is drawn to a flame.
"Power," he admits, was always his "thing."
"And Christians are the most powerful people on the face of the earth," he points out.
His conversion came by way of an encounter with Jubilee's silver-haired Pastor, Dick Bernal, during an appearance on a San Francisco talk show. The two met in the green room, and Bernal invited Pryor back to his hotel afterwards for coffee. "We kind of hit it off," Bernal recalls.
The Pastor was so enamored by the skinny, wasted looking Satanist that he later asked Pryor to accompany him to the Lea event, which was being sponsored by Jubilee. According to Bernal, they bonded, and Pryor apologized for organizing the protests.
But Pryor wasn't that sorry. He says now that he had smuggled in a pistol that night, and had planned on shooting Lea if the televangelist had said anything bad about the Pagans who were protesting outside.
Bernal says that Pryor does not draw a salary from Jubilee, noting that he's a member and not on staff. He adds, however, that Pryor gets to pocket all of the donations from his sermons, and does not have to share his take with the church.
Pryor insists he's barely making a living. During his sermons, white buckets are passed around to collect what he calls "love offerings." He is vague when asked what the donations amount to.
"If I collect one dollar, fine," he says. If I collect one hundred thousand dollars, that's fine too."
The deal he strikes with host churches around the country, he claims, is that he keeps the entire love offering if it exceeds his going rate for remote performances. If less, he takes the fee only. The rate varies, he says, but a fee of between $1,700 and $3,000 for an ninety minute service is about par. Travel expenses and accommodations are extra, he adds.
"I'm actually very inexpensive," he says.
Most of the money he takes in from love offerings and "teaching aide" sales, he insists, goes toward feeding and clothing the poor. Renee, he says, doesn't collect a salary, either.
"We just take enough to eat and out a roof over our head," he explains, noting that he lives alone in a room he rents in a home on 11th Street in Downtown San Jose.
The latest additions to his press file came by way of KNTV, when a Channel 11 news reporter, looking for a sound bite, informed him of the Los Altos School District's plan to ban Halloween celebrations during school hours.
And just like that, Pryor jumped headfirst into his newest cause. The school district's eventual decision to allow the celebrations motivated him even further. He now claims to be leading a nation-wide effort to ban Halloween school festivities at the federal level, arguing that Halloween is actually a celebration of the Pagan religion.
At the Los Altos school board meeting, where he spoke in favor of the ban, Pryor was loudly jeered. Dressed that night in a gray pinstripe suite, he showed up with his own personal cameraman. Renee, of course, was at his side, tirelessly listening to his continued complaints about having to speak last because of his non-resident (in Los Altos) status.
At one point he shouted to the board, "I'm a taxpayer!"
"Not in our district," a voice in the crowd countered. During one of the night's many lulls, a fierce looking woman sitting behind him leaned forward and growled, "Why don't you do yourself a favor and just leave?"
Later, a teenager loudly observed that "this guy is whacked."
None of this seemed to have any effect on Pryor, though. He seemed more concerned that, by the time he got to speak, it would be too late for the 11 o'clock news shows.
When he finally spoke, near midnight, someone in the audience hoisted a sign behind him that read "LSD user" as he began an argument about separating church and state. The crowd erupted into laughter when he announced himself as Reverend Pryor, and joined together in a mocking "oooooooohh" when he revealed his former satanic leanings.
All of this did nothing to deter Pryor. Not missing a beat, he even found time to pass one of his law enforcement guides to a uniformed cop standing guard nearby. The officer read the jacket copy, passed it to another cop, and then handed it back to Pryor.
Afterwards, a number of teens followed him out to where Renee had pulled up the car. One mother, watching as the high schoolers flocked around him, said out loud to no one in particular: "Get him away from the kids. If there is anyone who worships the devil, it's him."
PRYOR IS really on a tear now. He only has to point his hand in a certain direction and people go down in a collective swoon, like blades of grass under the footstep of an invisible giant. This at first appears slightly dangerous. He's making people collapse from way up on the stage, which means his handlers are not there to break their falls.
But not to worry. As Kay Tandeski, 50, explains it later, "When you fall down in the spirit, it's like you're falling onto a cloud."
Tandeski, a member of Jubilee for the past four years, and her stepdaughter Jaime, also attended today's seminar on the occult.
By the time the leave tonight, they will be true believers. Earlier, Pryor summoned Jaime, 30, to the stage. According to Tandeski, he spoke to Jaime about "some things in her past that only Jaime knew about."
Amazed by Pryor's power to divine, she believes that the Lord was using him as a human boom box. "It just confirmed to me that God loved her enough to speak to her," she says.
About halfway into Pryor's performance, the woman who can't stop laughing is beginning get on people's nerves, or at least it's gotten to the point where she has to be dealt with. Pryor finally gets around to dealing with her, addressing the woman from the stage.
"The lord has a sense of humor," he explains. "He's touching your heart with joy."
And then Pryor laughs too, perhaps loudest of all.
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Photo by Chris Gardner
Check out two video clips of the Rev. Pryor in action, from the "Law Enforcement Guide to Satanic Cults," an instructional videotape:
Photo by Chris Gardner
Copyright © 1996
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and Virtual Valley, Inc.