Was Epstein linked to a Phoenician child-sacrifice cult? What history actually says
The Epstein files have sparked online speculation of a satanic, child-sacrificing cult originating in ancient Lebanon
Was Jeffrey Epstein part of a satanic cult of ‘Baal’ worshippers who sacrificed children?
That’s one theory that has gone viral since the Trump administration released two tranches of Epstein files – the latest being last month’s dump of three million redacted files.
The theory centres on two specific files. The first, an email from Epstein in 2009 that had “Baal” written as the name of a financial account.
Online chatter has connected ‘Baal’ – also the name of an ancient Canaanite god that was the focus of a child sacrificing ritual – to another file that surfaced: the disturbing, yet still unproven, allegation sent to the FBI in 2019 of cannibalism on a yacht involving infants, which we previously reported.
MAGA-supporting rapper Nicki Minaj ran with that connection in a viral tweet that’s amassed over 24 million views.
The baby-killing-cult theory gained further momentum when far-right American podcaster Candace Owens, in an episode titled ‘BAAL SO HARD: The Epstein Files’ – which has 2.6 million views on YouTube – said, “The people we are fighting are effectively pagan gypsies who have been wearing the cloak of Judaism since the fall of the missing Khazarian empire”.
Adding specificity to the ‘satanic cult’, she referred to “ancient pagan festivals and ceremonies that centre around the earth’s cycles of death and rebirth”.
Also making renewed rounds on social media is a separate podcast episode from last year with an Anya Wick – who claims to have been born Anya Beth Epstein and to be Jeffrey Epstein’s niece. Wick alleges her Epstein family were part of a “Phoenician satanic fertility cult”. Despite her claims not being verified, that episode on YouTube received more than 3 million views and has since been cut into viral reels on Instagram and TikTok.
While the Epstein files have justifiably taught us to question everything, it is also spawning algorithm-led rabbit holes that are tying very loose threads of ancient history and mythology to a current political and criminal setting.
And as historians – who have studied these matters for decades and produced volumes of research – will often point out, retrofitting contemporary matters to an ancient world (or vice versa) is almost never a shoe that fits.
So here’s some historical clarification, grounded in academic research, on the specific ancient child-sacrificing pagan belief in question.
Who is Baal and was he ‘satanic’?
Baal – meaning ‘lord’ in western semitic tongues (spoken in the ancient Levant) – was a preeminent god in Canaanite religious traditions that were widely observed in modern-day Lebanon, Palestine and Syria for roughly 3,000 years before Christ.
The words ‘Canaanite’ and ‘Phoenician’ are used interchangeably for the same people – Phoenician being the Greek word ascribed to the sea-faring people from the Levantine coast who established colonies throughout the Mediterranean. To avoid confusion and maintain consistency, we’ll stick to ‘Canaanite’ in this article.
Owens references an earth cycle of death and rebirth, which is a famous mythical story known as the ‘Baal Cycle’ discovered in a major archaeological find in Syria in 1928.
But far from being ‘satanic’, Baal – as revealed in the Baal Cycle – was worshipped as a storm god who replenished the lands after being restrained by an evil god, Mot (which later evolved into the Arabic word for ‘death’ or mawt), in the underworld.
The story is tied to an agricultural cycle of rain (Baal) coming after long summers and droughts (Mot), lending to a philosophical meaning of rebirth and renewal (something I explore in my upcoming book on the Lebanese Civil War, which I coincidentally titled ‘Rebirth’ – no, I’m not in a satanic cult).
Did child sacrifice happen?
Yes, but, as always, history is nuanced and context is critical to the current theories running wild on the internet.
Child sacrifice was said to have taken place primarily in Carthage – a Canaanite colony founded by settlers from Tyre (a coastal city in present-day Lebanon) in the ninth century BC.
Archaeological discoveries of Carthaginian settlements have found remains of burned children in specific sanctuaries said to have been dedicated to communal activities and ritualistic sacrifice. The sanctuaries had similar inscriptions including the Canaanite/Phoenician word molk, meaning an offering to the god, Baal.
But according to historian Josephine Quinn, child sacrifice was not a widespread Canaanite practice. Instead, she writes, the child-sacrificing worshippers might have been a small, extremist cult among the Canaanites who were shunned in the ancient Levant precisely due to this horrific ritual.
She notes that the Levantine colonial settlements in the western Mediterranean that included the child-sacrificing sanctuaries were often congregated near one another, suggesting an offshoot of religious extremists that set out from the Levant and built communities elsewhere.
“No equivalent sites have yet been found on the Levantine coast, or anywhere else in the Near East. It seems likely, then, that it was only in the colonial world that the practice became fully institutionalised and ritualised with special sanctuaries,” she writes in her book, In Search of the Phoenicians.
Another important faction in the ancient Levant, the Israelites, also explicitly repudiated the practice, as written in the Hebrew Bible.
Okay, but where’s the disconnect?
Owens claims that Epstein and his clique of Zionist billionaires were essentially masquerading as Jews, and actually – as Wick alleges in her viral podcast episode – adhered to a Phoenician child-sacrificing cult.
She alleges that this cult has been in existence “since the fall of the Khazarian empire”.
Khazaria existed briefly as an ostensibly Jewish medieval kingdom in parts of present-day Russia between the seventh and ninth centuries AD. In other words, more than 1,300 years after the last record of child sacrifice occurring in the Near East, and 900 years after the Romans destroyed Carthage.
What online pundits – who, we must stress, are not historians – don’t explain is how child sacrifice, or any other Canaanite religious practice, suddenly emerged a millennium later in a corner of Russia, amongst an entirely different set of people who have no historical, cultural or ethnic ties to the Canaanites in the Levant.
There is no evidence that Canaanite or Mesopotamian mythological beliefs were adopted beyond the Caucasus, deep into the Eurasian steppes.
This was also at a time when Islam dominated the Near East and North Africa, while Christianity moved into Europe. This was not a period of Canaanite ritualistic revival, but the opposite – of the extinguishing of ancient pagan religions as Abrahamic empires expanded.
Don’t lose your mind
The Epstein files have shattered all notions of what we consider possible and impossible.
Could Epstein and his billionaire pedophile ring have conjured some fantastical allegiance to an ancient deity like Baal while performing their heinous acts? Sure.
Could they actually be a continuum of a 3,000-year-old ancient Lebanese extremist cult that was booted out of Lebanon, sacrificed kids in Tunisia and somehow managed to get to Russia in medieval times and to Little Saint James island in the 21st century? Nothing would stroke the Lebanese ego more than to know we gave birth to an illuminati society that has been secretly running the world for thousands of years (clearly not to Lebanon’s benefit).
Sadly, however, historians exist, with actual research that dismembers fantasies – irrespective of algorithms and celebrity tweets.
Does this rule out the theory circulating the internet? No, but it does mean a significant amount of historical evidence needs to be produced to connect dots spanning 2,000 to 3,000 years.
What is more plausible is that the billionaire pedophile ring is an outcome of extreme mental and moral deterioration – or, put simply, malignant narcissism. An example of how the human mind and soul becomes devilishly corrupted with an accumulation of power and wealth, feeding an insatiable desire for more.
Unchecked power and impunity are the drivers of these abominable crimes, not religious tradition – neither current nor ancient.
Got a tip? Send an email to tips@deepcutnews.com or send an anonymous Signal to @deepcut.25.