When Mel Gibson accused a mystic healer of being an agent of Satan: “Is this guy demonic?”
It would be an understatement to say that Mel Gibson has said some wild shit over the years, and even by his standards, questioning whether a martial artist and mystic healer was an agent of Satan himself is right up there with the most batshit insane. Then again, he did claim the guy made him levitate.
Even if you ignore the tirades that landed him in legal hot water, the two-time Academy Award winner has a long and undistinguished history of spouting off some unsavoury nonsense. Just ask Winona Ryder, who revealed that she was subjected to antisemitic remarks when they attended the same Hollywood party.
In the mid-1990s, he suggested that Bill Clinton had been handpicked as a future president three decades previously, intimating that a shady cabal of unnamed figures had been pulling the strings of sociopolitical power from the shadows for years, before sharing that his father, a known Holocaust denier, had told him about “something to do with the federal reserve” that he couldn’t quite recall, before refusing to divulge any more details since he’d “end up dead if I keep talking shit.”
Several years previously, his response to making homophobic comments was that he wasn’t “apologising to anyone,” and anyone who had a problem with that could “fuck off.” As for his thoughts on feminism? Well, 40 years ago, he declared it was a “term invented by some woman who got jilted,” during a conversation in which he additionally referred to his former female business partner as, simply, “a cunt.”
With all that in mind, tangling with the demonic seems positively quaint. Naturally, Gibson shared his otherworldly anecdote during an appearance on tinfoil hat haven The Joe Rogan Experience, with a spot of bother with his organs causing him to seek out the assistance of a Qigong master, an age-old system that relies on breathing and meditation to improve health, spirituality, and martial arts prowess.
“He was an allopathic doctor first; he went to medical school, he could write you a prescription, he could do all that stuff,” the actor and filmmaker said. “So, one day, he’s at me. I’m on my back, and he’s pointing rays of energy at me, and he hit me, and he started yelling at my organ, my liver, like, ‘Get out!'”
That was the normal part, because things got really weird after that. “I went up the wall, and there were like eight inches of air at my heels, and I was up the wall,” Gibson continued. “I was like, ‘Whoa’. And I came back down, and it freaked me out. He went, ‘It’s just science.'”
It hardly sounds like your garden variety kind of science, though, so how did Gibson react? “I was so freaked out I went to a priest,” he admitted. “I said, ‘Is this guy demonic or something, because he’s lifted me off the wall?'” Once the man of the cloth had confirmed that the Qigong master was not, in fact, a demonic agent of the devil, the Lethal Weapon star, who once called Christopher Walken the antichrist, felt much better about his unusual experience.
