Are you interested in angels, demons, spirits, ghosts, and monsters? Are you curious about their origins, tales, and influence upon history and on the present day? If so, sit back, relax, and welcome to Southern Demonology, the podcast that explores all of this and more, ProFootball is back, and so are the predictions.
Before we delve into the episode proper, I do have an exciting announcement. Southern Demonology is offering a holiday giveaway. Partially sponsored by a very generous soul in our Discord server, I am giving away five books for this season. The first is the best Hebrew grammar there is, Thomas Lambdon's Introduction to Hebrew Grammar. This is the book that I wish I had actually started my studies off, uh, because everyone else in my grad school program had used this book, and they were light years ahead of where me and another student who used Weingreen's um uh grammar uh was left.
So uh the next is Malachi Martin's Hostage to the Devil. The third is R.H. Charles's The Book of Enoch, and then the final two are what uh I consider to be the best two translations of the Bible. The JPS Tanakh for the Hebrew Bible and the RSV Revised Standard Version for the Christian New Testament. Full details with the terms and conditions can be found on the website at Southern Demonology.com under blogs. But qualifying can't be easier.
Go to our website, click on the link at the top of the page, or under the community uh section to join our Discord, then introduce yourself, and then in the giveaway channel, tell us about your favorite legend or ghost story and why. I also have all of the links and the snazzy graphic on our Facebook page, so check it out. Um I really wanted to do something for the holidays, and you know, I figured this would be kind of the best way that I could give back a little bit. Um, and yes, the total value of these books isn't astronomical.
I'm not a rich person after all, but uh I definitely want to do something, and um yeah, so I I really hope that you uh give it a shot. Uh I think it'd be a lot of fun. And I these are phenomenal books too, ones that I personally picked out. And since they go along with the rest of the subject matter that we have covered in all of these episodes, uh I figured it would, you know, nothing could be better. So but anyway, back to the matter at hand. So hearing about another person's dreams can be one of the most boring things one can experience.
After all, the power of dreams is that you are the one experiencing it. Divorce it from your own perspective, and they simply become random things strung together as they are usually nonsensical. Yet sometimes they are intricate stories, and the one that I had the other week is one of them. I was up at that time catching up on a fantastic anime from this season called Jujitsu Kaisen, which is all about curses Nadoi that assume human physical form and must be beaten. So perhaps some of the ideas from that anime found their way into this dream, but regardless, here it is.
A man is at an omsen, which is a Japanese hot spring, and witnesses a man two timing. He confronts him, and the other man readily admits to it. In fact, five women soon stand next to that man. The witness pleads with the women to get angry and leave, but the man smiles and says that they belong to him. In fact, the Sleasball said that they will uh they will at will work for him as prostitutes the next town over, and then proceeds to bring them to a doctor. He instructs the doctor to examine them and to tell him if any of them are virgins.
The doctor comes back and exclaims that all of them are, and begins to brag on the man for bringing him the highest quality goods. The man expresses shock that all of them are virgins, and rather than proceeding, he takes them all home and says he never wants to see them again. He goes back to the onset where the original man confronts him yet again about the fate of the women, and the Slea's ball says that he freed them, as they were much more innocent than he imagined.
And the the expression on this Leazeball's face you can tell that he felt good about the action, and that maybe he could be walking down a new path toward redemption. But then another figure dressed in a trench coat and fedora whose face is hidden, appears behind the sleaze ball and says to him that I bet you feel good about what you did, no? That you feel there may be some hope for you.
Never forget that you are about to take the most powerful emotion, love, and utterly corrupt it in those inexperienced women, and with its most base form of lust, and that there could never be any redemption or hope for you. And upon hearing that I I could just see the light of hope extinguish in this other man's eyes. And the witness realized the man in the fedora is a demon and has just reclaimed a soul that was in danger of escaping. And the witness thinks that i it's not fair, and he looks around for the creature's angelic counterpart, but one doesn't come.
It remains just the three of them in a room. And with that realization the demon gains a second soul that day. Now, yes, I know that there are so many things wrong about this medical exams to determine virginity one of the most egregious. As Emily from Adam Ruins Everything is famous for saying, Hymans don't work that way. But just bear with me because it is a dream, I swear to God. Um you know, so at this point I snap awake and immediately start writing all of this down before it fades from my memory.
And the reason why is that it this dream came at such a fortuitous time as I was writing this episode, which is all about demonic gateways. And by that I mean how does a demon seep into one soul? And to talk about that subject, you have to start with the question What would it take for you to sell your soul? This type of Faustian bargain written about by Goethe, sorry, I will always take the opportunity to say the name Goethe because it's just so much dang fun.
I mean, yes, yes, I am a dork, thank you for noticing, Goethe, um, captured the imagination of the world over and has you know, this has been done and redone in every medium known to humanity. And as an aside, one of my favorites is the Saturday Night Live sketch entitled The Devil Can't Write a Love Song, where an aspiring musician is fired from his job, has his girlfriend leave him out of exasperation, and then offers his soul for a hit song. And this is of course the point where Will Farrell playing the devil shows up and utterly fails to create one and is then escorted out.
And of course the irony to all of that is everything that preceded the devil's appearance is the ultimate epitome of a love song, but regardless. Um but this idea is entirely wrong headed, and by the idea I mean the Faustian bargain. Why in the ever living world would the devil actually help someone, even if just temporarily? Yes, there may be a big payoff for him in the end, but that's still a decent bit of work, and for an entity that rules the mortal realm, capitulating isn't truly his style. So what is taking everything with as much force, misery, and hatred as possible.
However, there is a small barrier to that, something called free will. One of the things that instantly kills a movie for me is when a demon can quote unquote instantly override one's will and assume control. Now we will explore free will and how that concept came about in a future episode, but just accept that premise for now. There was a particularly horrid movie that recently came out about a team that streamed exorcisms. Of course, these exorcisms were fake until as one who has ever seen a movie ever, one of these episodes becomes real.
And oh Lord, it was one of the worst abominations I've seen of late. But one of the many things they got wrong was that the woman who truly became possessed was just instantly taken over. Maybe they tried to explain it further in, but A, I don't have time to waste my life on such drivel, and B, given the quality of what I did see, it really wouldn't be worth my time listening to it. Wow, I am constantly amazed at how unopinionated I am. Fancy that. Anyway, sorry for the tangent here. So if a Faustian bargain is highly inefficient and domination by pure force isn't possible, then what is?
The answer is a demonic gateway. Though the term is rather bombastic, the idea behind it is rather simple. But in order to discuss that, we need to talk about dialectics. In the twentieth century there were three master theologians Karl Bart, Rudolf Baltman, and Paulus Tillich. In fact, while I worked at the Andover Harvard Theological Library all those years ago in grad school, I would actually pass by the death mask of Paulus Tillich every single day. It was hanging on the wall leading downstairs.
It was really for someone who had studied Tillich pretty extensively and actually written about systematic theology for the final paper in college, uh to then walk by his face every single day, it it was it was really, really interesting. Um but I'm not going to focus on Tillich for this conversation, but rather on the first in that list, Karl Bart. Though he had an absolutely staggering collection of writings, one of the things he is most known for is his dialectic theology, besides also trying to divorce theology from philosophy.
Though it does get a little mind-bendy in the good way at times, the basic idea is that God is unknowable except for through faith and grace. Those things belong to the divine. The mortal realm is absent those things. In fact, because we are so abased in sin and limitation, we can only have shadows of those things belonging to the divine. God has faith. We have the nearest approximation of that, which is religion. And that is kind of the observance of ritual. Right? We have law whereas God has true justice.
These concepts are dialectical because they are opposites that are bound together through their polar extremes. In fact, to Bart the cross itself represented this dialectic, where you had the flat bar, the horizontal, which represented the mortal realm, and then you had the divine that plunged through it, piercing it and giving it validity. I put forth the idea that the same goes for the infernal. In fact, that becomes the source of these demonic gateways. The infernal attempt to replicate a dialectic by masquerading as belonging to either the to the divine or to the mortal.
However, the true essence of the demonic is that of corruption and guile. Let me provide some examples, and for that we're going to turn to the fantastic book that you know I have spoken about before, and one of the ones being given away in the holiday, um Hostage to the Devil by the former Jesuit priest Malachi Martin. The book goes through five cases of demonic possession, and each is for lack of a stronger word insidious. As Martin writes in each case, one basic note of possession is confusion. Sex is confused with gender. Spirit is confused with psyche.
Moral value is confused with the absence of any value. Mystery is confused with untruth, and in every each in every case, rational argument is used not to clarify, but as a trap to foster confusion and to nurture it as a major weapon against the exorcist. Confusion, it would seem, is a prime weapon of evil. For instance, in the first case, Zio and the Smiler, a young woman named Marianne K, a natural recluse, goes off to study philosophy and physics in college.
She becomes tireless in her crusade to quote know everything, unquote, but she then becomes convinced that everyone is trying to keep said knowledge from her. That is, until a demon comes forth and substitute knowledge for balance. She starts drawing right side up crosses next to upside down ones because they belong together in her new vantage point. Being and non being are intermingled for her. Or in another case, Father Bones and Mr Menach. The priest becomes the possessed because for him love of nature is substituted for love of the divine.
All things holy are replaced with such generic words as light, a very common occurrence until the priest cannot utter the name of Christ. And you see this happening, this substitution taking away the holy and instead genericizing it. But simply labeling this substitution as mere confusion I think takes away from its evil. In fact, that is the gateway that the infernal utilizes to seep into one's being. It alters one's worldview entirely. And at first that alteration may seem like a simple one a feeling of peace when one thinks about a certain topic.
The symbol of light for Christ, the idea of balance when the quest for knowledge has failed. All once that gateway oh sorry and once that gateway is established, then all that's needed is to expand it. It becomes a sinkhole that slowly displaces more and more until it becomes a vortex that consumes one's free will. The possessed often recount huge swaths of their memories gone faded. But what's left are these markers decision points in which the possessed agreed to the invasion. But those moments they're couched in the most innocent of guises.
For Marianne Kay, it was two religious experiences, one where she stood in the back of a church and another one where she was observing uh uh a cross on the outside. And at both she was approached by what she thought of was the man and he would ask her a question and she would agree feel good about agreeing but it was each one of those agreements that seeped away her free will. In short, the infernal don't stoop to making bargains. Rather they trick their human marts into giving away their souls through confusion, which may originate in feelings or intellectual concepts.
After all, why in the world would you pay for something when people were simply give it to you? And then to add insult to injury, they are left with just the memories of when they had agreed to give away everything that makes them human. And that's if the possessed is lucky. When recalling one moment of clarity when an ambulance was called by her neighbors as she was found in a freezing apartment in the middle of summer reeking of death, Malachi writes from Marianne's perspective The only thing I wanted to do was to shout obscenities in their faces.
You missed it all I was just fucked by a big bellied spider. But there is no point in saying that. You know, I I can watch horror movies all day long. They don't bother me. But it's thinking that things like this may exist out there. Something that can just crawl into your life and use everything in your worldview against you with a smile, to take everything from you, to disguise the goodness that is in humanity, or worse, to rob everything that is holy, and then to steep it into such filth and degradation.
When I first read this book, I think I said this in episode one, I had nightmares for months afterwards. And I make a point of rereading this book at least once every few years. And it still gets to me. You know, Martin was a really interesting figure. You know, I don't advocate you buy in to everything that he wrote about, because some of his stuff does get just a little bit kooky. But if anything about this that's contained in this work is true, and I think there's a high probability of that, then this is the stuff of true nightmare. Goethe. Thank you all for listening.
I I really do appreciate it. And I uh I truly hope that you take me up on the offer of the holiday giveaway. Um five books, each one of them special in their own regard, something that may help to brighten up even if it's just a pinprick of light in the utter consuming darkness that has been 2020. I hope you take it up. Um because you know, yes, we do have a lot of listeners, but it's not like it's a one in a billion chance or one in a million. You know, we have a lot, but a lot is by my standards, not by you know millions or something along those lines.
So everyone has a really good opportunity to win. Um, so I hope you take me up on it. Uh, do read the full terms and conditions, you know, just to make sure that you know you qualify and everything else is good. Uh, but I've tried to make this as simple as humanly possible. The only thing that kind of limits this is the fact that I will be shipping these from Amazon and I do have to worry about shipping concerns on that one. So, you know, I am limiting this to uh residents in the US, and I really do apologize about that. I'm definitely not trying to exclude anybody.
Um and you know, if you do have a question, we can take it on a case-by-case basis just to see uh because I I I don't want to exclude people, but you know, um budget's a little tight, especially at this time of year. Um, and you know, I gotta do what makes financial sense while also trying to give something back. So I do hope you forgive me for that one limitation that I've got. Um, but otherwise, thank you for listening again. I I so thoroughly appreciate it. Please do visit us on Facebook at facebook.com slash Southern Demonology.
Uh, you can also find us on our website at Southern Demonology.com and then our Discord server. And don't forget we also have a Patreon community. If you would like to help sponsor other giveaways in the future or help to support this channel, if you have a few bucks lying around, then you know please uh feel free to donate and you will definitely earn some good perks um in the meantime. Uh that I can promise you. But anyway, uh again, I hope if you don't if we don't put up another episode, I'm hoping there's gonna be at least one more uh before the holiday season is upon us.
Um but if not, I hope everyone has a very um happy holiday. And otherwise, you know, keep up with us on our social media. Uh definitely will keep posting things as they come up. And uh again, thanks thank you so much, and I hope that everyone is staying safe out there.