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.
Welcome to the inaugural podcast of Southern Demonology, a show that will attempt to focus upon angelogy, demonology, pertinatural, and supernatural activity from antiquity until the present day. My name is JJ, and I welcome you and I'm very thrilled that you're with us. I hope that you enjoy it and uh hope that we can have some interesting times together. So, what I said before uh regarding what this show is going to be about was kind of a mouthful.
So I want to break that down just a little bit so everyone's aware of what you're getting yourselves into, which hopefully will be a good thing and not a negative one. Um, so we're going to cover a wide range of topics. Um, everything from simple ghost stories to folk tales, uh, apocalypses, uh, Dead Sea Scrolls, um religious beliefs, and a whole host of other items. And we're gonna do so from a couple of different perspectives. Um, first and foremost, it will be from an academic one. Um, that's what my background is in.
Um, and I I think that you can derive a whole host of interesting concepts from looking at things from the traditional point of view, but also from a rigorous, studious one. But in addition to that, we're also going to be looking at things from a spiritual perspective. But we're not going to contain ourselves to one religious tradition. So, on the upfront, just to be completely honest, um, when we're talking about angels and demons, of course, many different religions have that, and we will get to that.
But when I'm referring to those two specific terms, they will be rooted within the Judeo-Christian traditions. However, we're not going to limit ourselves to that. For example, I am a gigantic uh nehongophile, a person who loves all things Japanese, and I have a severe interest in uh Yudei and Yokai, um ghosts and uh monsters uh from that particular tradition. So now that we've covered what we're going to be talking about within this series, I guess the next question is who the heck am I? And why would you want to listen to anything I say about these particular topics?
And it's a it's a good question. Um, so I'm going to kind of lead you through a uh circuitous route and answering that uh give you uh a bit of a story about my background and hopefully you'll come to understand uh a little bit about me and where I'm coming from. I'm not the biggest fan of talking about myself, so it might be a little uh stop and start there, and I apologize for that, but um I think it bears a lot upon why I'm doing this and where I'm coming from. So I am from the smallest town in the state of Tennessee, called Slayden.
Uh, it's in the middle part of the state underneath the shadow of the Cumberland Plateau. Uh it's about 113 people big. If uh the U.S. actually used uh designations for uh hamlets and villages in addition to towns and cities, then it would definitely be a hamlet. Uh the city has one intersection, um, a defunct restaurant and garage, in addition to a tiny little cement building uh post office that might measure six by six if you're lucky, uh, and a community center with a tiny little Masonic lodge right in behind it. So we're not talking about a big area at all.
Um, it the town came around in the early 1800s, uh, had a railroad, uh, kind of boomed at that time, and has since uh that has uh gone away uh in recent years. It is a place that is filled with uh clans, uh so family uh organizations uh that are still kind of led by a particular individual, usually a matriarch. Uh for my family, that was my grandmother. Uh it's also a place that is, of course, just geologically, I mean geographically speaking, uh, it's in the heart of the Bible Belt. So uh every half mile you'll have a church. Uh some of them are typical, uh, most of them are not.
Um and in addition to that, you have tons of graveyards. And I think that's where we're gonna start. I think uh most of a lot of my childhood memories come from being in a graveyard or having something to do with it, just because they're so plentiful, and for a few other reasons as well that we'll get into. Uh for example, when I was six years old, uh my family decided to buy plots.
So uh one day most of my extended family, which is rather large, got together, uh spray painted our names on cement blocks, and then went to uh the uh closest church held to uh that's near us and planted them in the ground. So even at that time I knew exactly where I was going to wind up once uh I shuffled the mortar coil. Uh in addition, my grandmother, great aunts, and great uncle and I would all get together and mow um another cemetery that uh houses where my uh great grandma and great-grandpa um currently reside.
And that's because the church that was uh supposed to take care of it had neglected their responsibilities. Uh, I think it's mainly because no one wanted to pay for the upkeep. So my grandmother took that over so that um her mom and dad would have a uh a good place to be in. And I think that's kind of the overriding sentiment about where I came from. And I think part of that is just traditional, uh, but other parts I think have slowly evolved over time. Slayden is a place where the dead walk among us. And I mean that in both the metaphysical and the literal sense.
Uh the dead never leave us, and those that have passed away are still very vibrant to their descendants. Stories are told about people. I grew up hearing tales about my great-grandmother, great-grandfather, um, and even several generations past them. I know their names, I know their stories. They are a vibrant tapestry that make up my life. And even though I've never met most of these people, I still know about them. But it's also true in the literal sense. Our town is built upon Indian burial mounds. I have experienced quite a few paranormal activities.
The house that I grew up in when up until when I was in eighth grade is a log cabin that has been around for over two hundred years. It was first built way back in the holler, and then it was uh transported uh uh log by log into where it currently rests today. And in that attic of that house, there is a presence there. I have felt it, I have seen its activities, and so is all my family. In fact, we affectionately call it Patrick.
So I I have gone into this not because I love hearing the sound of my own voice, in fact, I rather hate it, which has made uh editing this thing quite kind of interesting. But um it's to go over the kind of environment that I was brought up in. Um ghost stories are a major part of the day, and I loved it. I loved every single thing about it. I would go to school and I would tell ghost stories. I was the storyteller for our entire class. It is something that has kind of uh stuck with me uh even to the present day. Uh in high school I was I went into a debate club um and college.
I was in theater and debate and model UN, and even now I teach a class of uh would-be uh Lincoln Douglas debaters. And so I I love that oral tradition of storytelling. Uh I think it also explains why in high school I wanted to go into cryptozoology. For those who don't know what that is, um it is a field of study that attempts to unearth and uh focus upon uh creatures that have not been brought to modern science yet. Uh that includes everything from Bigfoot to Yeti to the monster of Lake Okeechobe to Loch Nest to whatever else you may want to have, um uh such as like the New Jersey Devil.
Um, all of these things um are the some of the more exotic facets of cryptozoology, which is what it's really been defined as. But it also examines more mundane creatures such as like um King Puma or a couple of other items. But so that's that's exactly where I've come from. Um, I love uh anything that is kind of out of the ordinary, and I think a lot of that is due exactly to how I was brought up. Fortunately, though, I kind of abandoned cryptozoology uh early on, and uh due to being exposed to debate, uh actually went into college to study uh philosophy and physics.
Uh as I arrogantly claimed at the time, uh I wanted to know about the physical and the metaphysical world around us. Uh fortunately, well unfortunately, or as the case may be, I did not have much of a talent for math. Uh, I went through uh calculus too and physics with calculus and realized that um although I could do it, I had no great aptitude in it. And honestly, I feel that whatever career that a person was going to go into, they have to be spectacular at it. Or at least that's the bar that I set for myself. And so I abandoned physics early on and uh picked up religion.
And our religion department had three different tracks to it. Uh, there was world religions, there was theoretical uh theological studies, and finally you had uh biblical studies. The one that interested me the least was biblical studies. The one the the first one that drew my attention was World Religions. Now I came from a tiny place.
Uh I went to a college, which was a tiny place in uh South Central Virginia called Hampton Sydney College, which was an all-male institution of about a thousand people, and it was located directly next to a town card Farmville, uh, just to give you any idea of the uh small place, too small place that I relocated to. And I wanted to know more of the world around me, and I thought that world religions would be a great place to do that. And I was right. Um, you know, I got to study the basics of a lot of different items.
Um, I really fell in love with Buddhism, um, got to study underneath some phenomenal professors for that. So in our religion department, you had to pick a track that you really wanted to devote the majority of your time to in order to get a major. And I although I started off in world religions, theological studies also really applied uh appealed to me. You know, I was already in philosophy, which I love and still do, so theological studies was a a natural extension to that, you know, getting to look at Karl Bart and Paul Stilek, uh it you know, their words sang to my soul.
But as fate would have it, the one area that I was not really interested in became the one that I actually got my major in, and that is biblical studies. And that's because one fateful day while walking by the library, I saw a uh sign-up sheet for biblical Hebrew, and I don't know what fascinated me about that, but a uh the professor I knew very well, Dr. Rogers. Uh an older gentleman, one of the most intelligent yet humble and gregarious individuals I have ever had the pleasure of knowing. So knowing that he was going to teach it was uh definitely a plus, but i it was much more than that.
It was I think part of it was a little bit of shock value, some of it was um the the alphabet was so new to me, but uh for whatever reason I latched on to that and I took it. There were four of us in the class, and that led us to some really interesting avenues. Um but from Biblical Hebrew I got the chance to study uh Geez. Getez is a really interesting language for a lot of reasons. Um it is the liturgical language still of Ethiopia. Um Geez really is referred to in English as um classical Ethiopic. It's uh it's pretty unique amongst uh Semitic languages.
Get Ez a truly exceptional and difficult language for a couple of reasons. Um first the alphabet. It was taken from uh Old South Arabian, which was a language we thought was mainly uh used to inscribe um uh royal messages or proclamations into buildings. And some genius along the way, and I mean that in a a literal sense, not in a sarcastic one, um, some truly advanced individual realize that reading the language may pose difficulties, and that's because in Semitic languages you often do not get vowel pointings.
So you'll get the consonants that are written, but you'll be lucky to know what the actual vowels are that go within that word. Uh for example, in Hebrew, uh if you happen to see something that looks like a uppercase T underneath the letter, then that is a long A. Uh if you see something that looks like a semicolon underneath a letter, then that is a schwa or a short or non-existent E. Um and then you have the holem, which is like a point uh that is um over a uh in between two letters, and that's usually a uh that's a long O.
Well, in uh classical Ethiopic, they took a completely different route. Um, this uh school or individual or whoever came up with it, they decided to morph every single letter uh into a new shape based upon the vowel that came after it. Uh so for every single letter you have six different permutations. Uh and it's it it it's it's amazing. It's just absolutely fantastic. Um but one of the uh it it was kind of rare to be able to get to study this language, uh, mainly because of the fact that very few people in the US know it. And luckily, uh Dr.
Hall, who I chose to be my major professor at HSC, uh he got to study the language underneath his uh major professor at Duke, Dr. Wintermute, and uh he began to teach me. And uh I I can honestly say I don't think there's ever been a case of, at least for me, of greater disorientation um the first day I tried to read uh a passage in the in in the native script of Get Uz. Um the book that most people learn get us from is by uh Thomas O. Lambden. Uh O stands for Odin, which is the fantastic which is probably the most fantastic middle name I've ever heard.
Um but uh Professor Lambden um he wrote The introduction to Getz, and um he's kind of a hero, and I'll try to go into a little bit of that as well. Um, but but anyway, uh you start off learning the language by looking at it in uh Romanization, so just using English letters, and the reason why is that unlike Hebrew, you don't have a designation for when a letter should be doubled, uh, and those are extremely important, especially when you're learning about uh conjugation. Uh like for example, uh, if you want to say, you know, I love you, um, like the three-letter root is f QR Fecker.
Um, but if you want to actually say I love you, it would be you know, efectre key. Uh that Q is doubled. Um, and if you're just looking at the native strip, you can't tell that. Uh so you get through the vast majority of the work learning the language and romanization, and then suddenly all you have there comes a page in the book in which it's completely typed in the native script. And it when I went through that, um, I actually left the place, the our um our religion department house. It was kind of like an old Victorian house, which was fantastic. Uh, but it had really narrow stairs.
Um, almost fell down the stairs twice. Realized that I had put my pen in my pocket uh without the cap on, so I had ink running all the way down my leg, walking back to my dorm room. Um, it it was just one of the most disorientating things I've ever been through. Um, but regardless, um Ethiopic is so uh terrifically important from an academic standpoint because of the fact that the Ethiopic Orthodox Church has the largest collection of holy writings of any Christian denomination, or at least the ones that I'm aware of, especially from an Orthodox point of view.
And that's because they hold wholly a collection of texts that are known as the pseudopigrapha. Um from Latin that directly translates into false epitaphs, but they were a collection of works that was written in between uh the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament, um, in which people tried to answer questions that they had. Like, for example, in you know, Genesis 6, you have all of us talk about the Nephilim, these giants. What were they? You know, were they part spirit? Were they all physical? Um were they really the sons of angels?
These are questions that rabbis um and Christians have struggled with for a long time because that the language that's in Genesis 6 is so bombastic that it's really difficult to know how to translate that, what what it means. Uh, and so you had these writers that claim to be uh Enoch or another uh a famous person from Ben from uh from the Masoretic text, uh, in order to try to answer some of these theological questions from a very definitive standpoint. Um so um these words captured my imagination.
For example, you have first Enoch, which is a religious text that first advocates for a solar calendar over a lunar one. But that's probably the least interesting part, at least for me. The first part was actually the examination of experts.
All of these items are amazing, and you know, we had them preserved in classical Ethiopic. But later, we also found Enoch in Jubilees preserved within uh the Dead Sea Scrolls, which taught us that these warts were considered canonical. And the Dead Sea Scrolls is an there that's another whole chapter, um, uh especially some of my favorite passages, like uh 4Q, 5, 10, and 11. But needless to say, the pseudo pigrapha really drew my attention, especially for how they treated um the ideas of angels and demons and uh really kind of broke them down and explored their natures, etc.
And so when I finished college, I had a choice. I could either go uh into philosophy for a master's or I could go into uh continue my education within religion. And uh luckily I was accepted into uh Harvard Divinity School, and that's where I went for a master's in theological studies. And there I got more of an opportunity to study these kinds of ideas and concepts.
So I guess on paper my degree from there was really in Semitic philology and the pseudopigrapha, uh, but truly what I used the vast majority of my time there was to study um angels and demons and um the idea of chaos uh and how they've been preserved. And the one thing that I kept running up against time and time and time again was how these ideals that were that came around within Second Temple Judaism, around angels and demons, they have been flash-frozen in time. And they still have a profound impact upon the present day.
I don't think that you can talk about the concept of exorcism or the Roman rites without directly tracing all of those ideals to that time period between you know 150 uh BCE to 70 CE. It's what fascinates me. Um it's what drove most of my work. Now, today I am not in that uh in those studies anymore. Uh after graduate school, I had the choice of either pursuing a PhD, which would have been in most cases another 10 to 12 years of my life and an infinite supply more of student loans, which I already still have more than enough of.
Um, or I could go into what had captured my attention while I was also in college and grad school, and that was development. Um, so I've been in IT for the past 18 years. Uh I'm now an architect, uh, senior, uh technical lead, uh, overlook a fantastic group of developers and get to working on some really interesting problems. And but what still captures my heart and my attention are these tales, not just of angels and demons, but also the spiritual beliefs behind them, how they've been impacted, and how the current day is really still shaped by what happened so long ago in the past.
So that's kind of the really long-winded answer to that, but um so I am academically trained in this field, um, but I uh, you know, that's not really what draws me, you know, it's it's this ideal of the strange or the unknowable and how they affect us in our current lives. I was taught to respect the mysteries of death from a very early age, and they still draw me in. So it's I guess it's that sense of mystery and wonderment of uh of spiritual depth and confoundment that I want to really explore within the series.
And I want to hear what you have to say if uh any unlucky soul happens to stumble upon this and uh they're you know, and you're interested as well, you know, bring up those ideals or concepts in which you want to hear us talk about, and we'll do so. So now that we have discussed what we will be talking about and the reasons of why uh we will be talking about it, the other aspect to this is I want to cover what we're not going to discuss um in this podcast, or if we do so it will be in a very ancillary manner.
So in the past few years um I've gotten into watching uh various uh YouTube channels uh that will discuss uh paranormal activity, found footage, uh that kind of stuff. And though it's really interesting, um it's also kind of heartbreaking.
Um so if you take some of these channels like uh Top Five Mysteries or Unexplained Mysteries, they will in a completely serious voice, they will discuss some facts and then they will turn around and ask absolutely ludicrous questions like, do you believe that this really is an alien conspiracy, or do you believe this was an ancient civilization that was found uh fifty million years ago, or whatever they may bring up? Um I'm not interested in conspiracy theories. Um moreover, I'm not going to be going over like modern uses of magic, whether it's um uh Wiccanism or whatever else it may be.
And I'm not saying that those are not valid avenues of exploration. It's just um those are not items in which I am particularly interested in. So uh most of this will be from, you know, a a ghost stories perspective or an academic perspective or something along those lines. But um, we're not really going to be delving into how can you cast uh this kind of spell, or uh, you know, uh what uh ancient civilization may have really been around, or what secrets do the governments uh not really want you to know. Um that's not the purpose of this whatsoever.
Um, and I'm not particularly interested in talking about those kinds of items. So um I hope it doesn't disappoint too many of you out there, uh, but that's just not really my focus. So I I apologize in advance if that's what you're really looking for. So now I want to wrap up this episode by talking a little bit more about grad school and Ethioptic, uh, and some of the literature that is found within that particular tradition. So, uh at Harvard, I got the chance to study under Dr. Hunegart, who th the man is utterly brilliant.
Um if he's not the top Semitic philologist in the world, then he is one of them. Um wrote the grammar for Assyrian, uh, knows probably about thirty to forty uh ancient languages, um, and goodness knows how many modern ones. Uh Doctor Hunegaard is also the spiritual inheritor of uh Thomas Lambdon, um, who you will remember me talking about previously. But uh yeah, Dr. Hunegaard was Lambden's number one student and kind of took his place at Harvard. Um I got to take continue my uh uh Ethiopian studies uh with uh Dr. Hunegaard.
And uh in fact in that class I got to uh t study classical Ethiopic alongside the uh patriarch of the uh Ethiopian church, his brother, uh Johan, who is a really nice guy. Um it was a truly unique experience to be able to do that. We went through a lot of different items. Uh he advised me a tremendous amount, um, and I am always going to be grateful uh for him and his teaching. Um so a little bit about the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, and um if I say anything incorrect, then please people from that uh persuasion uh feel free to correct me.
But this is at least what I had gathered through my studies. So the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, it did um inherit the ranks and titles of the priests and nuns from the uh Greek traditions. However, what it did not take from uh Roman Catholicism or Greek Orthodoxy or other forms of orthodoxy was its um or those traditions underlying uh the basis, which is Aristotelian and Platonic logic. Um and I think you can see that within uh the words of uh of Augustine and Augustus, but the Ethiopian Orthodox Church it takes more of a uh mystical approach to things.
Uh it so within that tradition it actually espouses that you know Christ, uh Jesus Christos Lotus of Hot uh or praise be upon him, Jesus Christ, um, was not just the savior, but was also an incredibly powerful magician in his own right.
Um there is a fantastic book called uh Kebronegesht, the glory of the kings, in which it uh has many, many tales in it, but one that uh is fascinating is one where Christ is walking along the Sea of Galilee and a uh demoness called Nadada rises from the waters and her eyes glow red and she rears her head back and blasts a cubit, I mean a uh a column of flame, a hundred and uh thirty-six cubits into the air and Christ looks at her, waves his hands and utters an incantation and it banishes her back into the water which is beautiful.
It also maintains the kind of coherency of water uh doubling as chaos, and I I hope to get into that maybe some next episode. But this is not an uncommon kind of theme in a lot of um of uh e Ethiopian literature and religious literature in particular. In fact, the what I really want to go into now is the concept of uh Debtera. Uh so Debtera are a specific class of priests and they can have various responsibilities. Uh for example, there's a uh a beautiful tradition of singing within the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.
Um and they're often called whispers, um, and there are like twenty-nine different art forms of whispering. Uh but the Debtera are primarily known for inheriting and utilizing one of Christ's most powerful proclamations to his followers, which was that he gave power over demons to those who believe in him. And these priests take that to heart. They are known for creating scrolls that protect people. And if that's where it ended, maybe it wouldn't be such a uh such an interesting story, but these priests they will they go through a very ritualized process of creating these types of scrolls.
Um they will sacrifice a lamb uh or goat and um ritualistically prepare its skin and then they will go off and they will capture a demon. And they do this in a variety of ways. Typically they will trick them um by handing out um eggs or something else, but they capture the power of demons and they put them into the scrolls. Uh in fact these scrolls beautifully made. Um they actually utilize the Zoroastrian system of magic, uh, which is found a very commonly in a lot of practices in the Middle East, but it uses red and black text.
So black will be the normal words, but any holy or magical words will be typically written within red. And
they will capture these demons, put them into these scrolls, and they normally do so through some um iconography of angels, but they also use the uh seal of Solomon, uh, which is kind of like a grid um in which you'll see these demonic eyes peering out. Uh and these scrolls um they can protect against various types of items, but they always protect against other demons. Um in fact one of the most common usage uh usages of this uh power is for protecting uh pregnant women from various types of evils.
These scrolls typically start off with your standard prayer of um Basema Abwe Wald Re Manfas Kadusa Haru and Lok uh which is in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit the one Lord and then they will start naming off specific demons um in which the scroll is meant to protect from the wearer from um one of them are called Shoteli which are these this race of uh baby killing demons um another one is within the Greek tradition is called Ottobus. Uh but it's the twin it's the two snakes that circle the world swallowing uh their own tail.
It's uh to to read these scrolls are it they're absolutely fascinating. Um I actually I I now became acquainted with this tradition um while I was still in grad school. Um they a request had come in one day uh to Mr. Cliff who ran um uh most of the services at Andover Harvard Theological library for a uh for a scholar who knew uh Gez and Dr.
Hunegaard was way too busy um and Cliff himself who knew Ethioptic because he actually studied with Hunegard and we're really good friends um he didn't have time so he forwarded the request to me and I got to uh meet this lady and what she was attempting to do was study these uh Debtera scrolls uh for her PhD dissertation.
Uh she was a uh an art uh art history major and was trying to look at these scrolls from a healing perspective and she forwarded quite a few uh copies to me uh and I would spend eight to twelve hours a day in uh in the uh GAS library translating these um and then getting together with her and going through them what they meant um and what their purposes were. Uh in fact I uh she even made arrangements to look at a collection of Debtura scrolls which are held uh at uh Howard University.
So we went there together and were able to flip through these beautifully illustrated scrolls uh which can be anywhere from you know a a hundred to three hundred years old all using a variety of uh language. Some of these strolls were just completely made up um and other ones were Ethiopia is kind of interesting because it uses an entire variety of pluralization.
So just like Arabic it has broken plurals uh in typically six different patterns uh but then depending upon if something is an animal or an inanimate object uh you can have varieties of ways of uh indicating that something is more than one.
Um the other interesting thing is that within Ethiopic uh so uh early Ethiopia was conquered by the Cushitic people and uh Ethioptic had a lot of different guttural sounds so they had your typical olif had your un had your ha they actually had a third stronger ch along with uh an S and SH sound and then a uh hard um s and then a uh a diphthong D which is kind of like a th all of those kind of faded away w uh under Cushitic influence. So you had now multiple letters that were being used to say the exact same sound um because all of the other sounds faded away.
So within Ethioptic whenever you come across a word that has one of these gutturals um for example if it was an H sound if you didn't know that word you have to go off and look for something that was a regular H, a the middle gear guttural or the high guttural because they could be used interchangeably. Uh spelling is really atrocious when looking through uh classical Ethioptic literature.
Um but regardless uh my student uh I actually got to serve in her uh PhD council uh for being able to look over these types of scrolls uh she actually went to Ethiopia and interacted with a lot of Deptera there and the one thing that she found out that I wasn't aware of is that some Deptera live to a ripe old age but Deptera are typically talked about in hushed tongues.
In fact when a Deptera dies they're normally found in the most contorted of positions things that are almost borderline unnatural because even in the Ethiopic Orthodox Church one may capture and have power over demons but one will never get away with that lightly. And I think that we can see kind of the same dealings with demons within the Catholic Church especially when dealing with the right of exorcism and I think that we're going to wrap it up from there.
Again I cannot thank you enough for tuning in and listening if you have any comments or questions please feel free to reach out with uh to me. You can uh get me at Southerndemonology at gmail dot com otherwise we're going to try to produce this show once every week if it garners some interest then that frequency may go up but uh otherwise I hope you enjoyed it and we will catch you next week. Have a good one This has been Southern Demonology please feel free to contact us at Southerndemonology at gmail dot com.
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