Christian colon hydrotherapy

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Streams in the Desert in Pahrump (!) Nevada is a Christian book store that also sells jewelry. And, by the way, offers hyberbaric oxygen treatments and Christian colon cleansing. According to the shop's owners, colon hydrotherapy is an ancient judeochristian practice described in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

And Streams in the Desert is not alone. Turns out the DSS Essenes have been appropriated by any number of modern-day practitioners who tout the spiritual benefits of inner cleansing. But if you actually read through the available collected texts of the Scrolls, you won't find the cited texts there.

What gives?

In a nutshell, it goes back to a guy named Edmund Bordeaux Szekely, who claims to have discovered a pristine collection of ancient Essene texts. In his Essene Science of Fasting, the group is depicted as advocating enemas as part of its spiritual discipline. After that, the deluge.

Fun bonus fact: Jim Bakker's Heritage USA included a shop selling a seaweed drink mix that purported to give your colon a heavenly cleansing. The proprietors gave me heaps of the stuff free as a loss leader when I interviewed PTL folks for a project in grad school. Thanks to their description of what this miracle seaweed would do to me for the first three or so days after chugging it down, I never touched the stuff.

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