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.
Hello. Welcome back to Southern Demonology. This is episode four. I am your host, JJ, and as always, I thoroughly thank you for listening in. Uh in fact, during this week, I received a letter, well, really an email, from uh Carl and his fiancee, Katie, uh, who uh said that they enjoyed the show and uh hope it uh continued along. So in that vein, thank you very much. Uh that was my first piece of uh correspondence regard regarding the show, and I was uh tickled to death. Uh in fact that came during a particularly bad day, so it the timing could not have been more perfect.
Uh and I want to invite everyone else uh to feel free to reach out uh to me at southerndemonology at gmail.com uh in order to give an opinion about the show, uh to voice any particular topics that you may be interested in, anything along those lines. And also in that same vein, I want to thank my inner circle of confidants, uh, which really is just my uh family and friends, uh, who have listened into the show uh and provided advice.
So uh to my mom, uh who has given me a lot of good tips, uh to my developer friends uh Abegit and Aliyah, who actually put in my head to begin with the idea of starting this podcast, uh, and to uh Jackie for listening and providing some feedback as well. Thank you all. Um without my support network, uh this show would A never have existed, and B, certainly wouldn't be in anywhere near uh the uh shape it needs to be in without them. So to everyone out there who has supported this, uh whether it's by just listening or um by actually providing feedback, thank you.
Um I I thoroughly appreciate it more than I could ever say. So I have deliberated about what I should talk about for this episode. And I've really thought long and hard, and I've kind of vacillated back and forth on uh between a couple of different topics. So I first thought about uh doing an episode on Angelic Stript, uh, which is not only uh an alphabet that claims to be from uh Angelic Messengers, uh, but it also can be uh writings or even just uh the names of angels themselves.
And I we will definitely get into that because uh that also includes a bit of a uh personal quest and a mystery all round up into one, and hopefully I can do that topic justice when it uh when I do get around to that one. Um I've also thought about uh doing an episode on uh magical writing, its origins, Oriastrianism, and uh and uh how it's now used in uh Ethiopia. And again, uh I've touched a little bit on that, and we will get into that one as well.
Um also thought about uh just doing some uh good old ghost stories uh from where I'm from, uh to actually put the southern into the demonology portion, as you will. But I landed on another topic, uh, which is actually getting into what perternatural means and is and to go into the demons. This is a really tough topic for a couple of different reasons. But I think it's one that that is going to be invaluable. I mean, especially since this is one of the main components of what this podcast is supposed to be about. I mean, it's right there in the name.
So especially since this show is in its infancy, why not actually go and delve into all that? So that I think that's where we're gonna land up. But there's a few before we can get into that, um, we need to go into some clarifications uh and some explorations of topics. Um the first, I mean, there are some concepts that we're going to get into that need to be explored, because if we don't, uh then uh you know, there's a possibility that half the conversation might be missed.
But the other part of all of that is I wanna let you know where I come from because I think that is a huge piece of the puzzle. So as I've s and I've in episode one we kind of touched on this. I mean, I I went into why in the world should you ever listen to me on this particular topic. And hopefully I answered that.
Uh if I didn't, please feel free to let me know and uh I can try to elaborate uh without going uh too much more into uh just about me, because I'm I'm not a big for as much as I have talked about myself, and I apologize about that, um I'm not a huge fan of actually going into all of that. But for this episode, you need to know that I have skin in the game. But I also want to r really re-establish the goal of this podcast. So uh as I've said, I am an academic. When you go into uh study uh religious uh concepts for a postgraduate uh degree, there are two different tracks that you can take.
Um you can either go uh for a master's of divinity, which is often abbreviated to mdiv, and that is the practical side of the house. Or you can go for a master's of theological studies, an MTS degree. And that's the route that I went. I I approach a lot of things first and foremost from an academic perspective, and that's where I am most comfortable with. But that's not to say that there is not a personal stake for me in all of this. And that's kind of where I I really want to um to to get into now.
Because I'm not here to advocate for my belief system, I'm not here to push my belief system onto anybody else. That is absolutely not my goal. But I do try to be forthcoming about where I am coming from. Um if my personal beliefs are mixed in, uh I try to preface that. But I am a human, I'm infallible, I'm going to not do that at certain points, or maybe the biases that I am speaking from are so ingrained that I don't even recognize it.
So I think it's really helpful for the reader to be completely aware of not only the topic that is at hand, but also the person who is speaking to that topic. Otherwise, you're lacking some pretty vital information that uh that may lead you down the wrong path. Uh the speaker may be uh coming from a point of assumption that could lead you astray, uh or something else. So uh so this is an academic discussion. This is an experiential discussion. Not that I have a ton of experiences about all this, uh, but I do have some and I'm more than happy to share those.
This is absolutely not a practical discussion if you are looking for a podcast that will try to teach you how to use magic or do spells or do any of that kind of stuff, please go elsewhere. I have no interest in delving into that and I never will. Uh and that's not the purpose of this. But fourth and foremost, this is a personal podcast in that I'm not just going to espouse beliefs. I have interest in each of the things that uh are related in the intro, whether it's you know, angels, angelogy, demons, demonology, spirits, ghosts, monsters, all that stuff I have a severe interest in.
And there are reasons for that. I think episode one covered that really well, hopefully. Um But there are there's also other uh things that have influenced me, and this is what I want to go into first and foremost, because I think it will really relate to you why I'm interested in this topic, but more so than that, they're not this topic is just not academic. I have a personal stake in this game. So we're gonna take a quick 30 second break, and then we will be right back and get back into it. Thank you again for joining.
That is not on purpose, it's simply the fact that this topic has required a great mil great deal more deliberation uh than the other ones in the past, and that's because I'm kind of opening up a door into my outlook on life, um, even perhaps into my soul. And yes, and I've done that in the first episode. But this one, it just feels a lot more personable, so it's taken me a little bit more time to actually try to put this all together.
So, with that being said, I do typically try to release on um over the weekend, uh, usually Saturday or Sunday, but this time it's coming out Monday night, very late Monday night. So uh again, I apologize for that. So I was saying before, I am primarily an academic, however, I am also a believer. I am a Christian, and I tell you this not to advertise my faith, nor to try to convince anybody. Um hopefully I'm framing this in such a way that you'll see what I'm the points that I'm trying to uh to get across.
In in fact, the one of the reasons I'm telling you this is the fact that my faith is a very quiet one. Um it's not one that I actively proselytize or advertise in any way, shape, or form. In fact, my faith is kind of a a specialized thing, a a highly individualized faith that has been shaped by my unique experiences in life, which anyone has. Uh, but uh I do try to recognize that fact. So even if I wanted to hold my faith up as a banner and say, oh hey, look at me, woohoo, this is great. Um, it's not going to fit anybody else but me.
So um anyway, I I I tell you this because uh I think that this has a lot of lot to bear not only upon the conversation, but also how I view things, what my worldview is, my blick, whatever you might want to say. As I have said before, my uh upbringing was in the belt buckle of the Bible belt. Um every two miles there is a church, uh, there may even be much more than that. And in spite of that, my family has never been tied down to a particular religious experience or even a particular denomination. Now, by and far, uh in my neck of the woods, there are Irish settlements which are Catholic.
Uh, and around those Irish settlements are likely where you're going to find uh more Protestant offshoots of that uh in terms of Lutheranism, etc. But where I'm from, uh it's predominantly uh Protestant. So you will have all kinds of different Protestant churches around, uh whether it be Southern Baptists, which in where I'm from is typically the most prevalent, but uh also Presbyterian Methodist, um the Church of Christ, because if it's not of Christ, it's of the devil, yay! Uh one of their favorite little slogans, unfortunately.
But anyway, um but we're in so as I was saying, uh my family's never been tied down to any particular one. In fact, my mom in her infinite wisdom told me when I was a kid that I was free to choose whatever religion I wanted to, and so I tried a few different denominations. I went to the Southern Baptist Church uh up the street, uh, another one down the street, uh, went to a couple of Presbyterian ones, a couple of Methodist ones, and I would say that I was raised on a particular diet of uh sermons.
So in any particular church that you go to, if you would ask a Southern Baptist per uh parishioner what's the difference between Southern Baptism and Presbyterianism or Methodist or whatever, they're not going to have a good answer. Or at least that's been my vast experience. In fact, I would say that the differences between individual churches and denominations is not a doctrinal one. Um, it's not a set of beliefs that define one. Um typically it's just whatever church you feel your spirit being moved in. Um and that goes for quite a few different ways.
And but uh what it really boils down to is that most churches are led by the cult of personality that is exhibited in uh the preacher of that particular church. So my diet of early Christianity was pretty much uh based upon hellfire and brimstone uh uh uh sermons. That's what most Sundays were filled with. But they were also filled with other things too, and ones that still kind of not still mean not kind of still deeply disturb me to this day.
I went to one church that invited in a guest preacher, and this preacher got up and proclaimed that all uh black and Jewish people were going to go to hell unconditionally. That shocked me. I absolutely did not believe that, even though I was a uh poorly educated person in a really small backwater, that railed against my soul. But it wasn't just racism that you would encounter, and you can encounter that a lot. It was the heresy as well. So my mom had a best friend um named Vicky, and she was a in her family was a they were big church goers.
And Vicki attended a few different congregations, but when I was in about an eighth grade, she got wrapped up in this new church that had started in Dixon. Their curl colors were uh black were uh purple and white, and so people called them the purple people eaters, as they would like to do. But um they were going to have a missionary trip, and I was invited to go along, and I was curious, so I accepted. So for a week or a week and a half, uh in between my eighth and ninth grade summers, uh, we went to Detroit and began to proselytize to the people there.
And my first inclination that something wasn't quite right was I was in a uh in the revival.
All the time. And there was such a look of zealotry in her face that I immediately backed off. Cause one, I was in a strange environment, surrounded by strangers that I had only accidentally gotten to know the past few days. I wasn't about to try to become an outcast for no good reason whatsoever. But I chalked that up to a one-off experience. But then, after the missionary trip ended, I began to go to a few sermons. And it was one particular summon sermon that drove me away.
So the uh main preacher of this church, which had started to grow quite a bit, uh, was a a youngish fellow, probably early thirties, and he got in front of the entire congregation and told us that everyone was appointed a guardian angel. And if a particular person rejected God or led a bad life or whatever it may have been, and that person wound up going to hell, then that angel that was sent to protect that individual was going to be banished to the outer realms of limbo. So first, there is no such concept as limbo within Christian traditions.
There is uh purgatory for Catholics, but nothing like that for especially a southern uh Baptist derivative offshoot. And two, that is just wrong to say to anyone. There's no basis for this anywhere. This was just random um garbles that this individual had pulled up from whatever base misunderstanding the person had had and then shouted it out to the community. I am not trying to badmouth Protestantism or any religion. That's not what I am about.
But I will say that a real concrete flaw that many of the churches in the area that I grew up in, and maybe this is very different elsewhere, I I don't know. I don't have that experience, and I'm not trying to advocate for that. But there's a real problem, and that is in the neck of the woods that I come from. People have a fervent belief, and this is probably the one belief that is common to most of the Protestant religions um where I'm from, is that anyone can open up the Bible, read it, and understand it.
While I'm not saying that a person can't read it and make some understandings of it, and I'm not saying that a person is unable to read the Bible and then um not be moved by it. My fundamental problem is that most of these preachers in these small churches have no formal religious training whatsoever. They have no education. And so all they do is they open up a Bible, they start to read, and then they believe that whatever comes out of their mouth because they are filled with the Holy Spirit is allowable to say and is going to fit within God's greater picture. And that is not the case.
There are so many sections of the Bible which are incomprehensible to people unless they have had training. And that's because to truly understand, and at least this is my belief, and um I may very well be wrong, but um this is where my academic training comes into play. If you do not understand the sits and leavens of a particular situation that is described, then you will not understand. In fact, there are scholars that do not understand certain portions of the Bible, and there's a few reasons for that.
But before we get into that, we're gonna take another small little break, uh, and then we will be back and finish out this episode. Hope you stay tuned. So by this point in time in my life, I was pretty disillusioned with the church, with any church. I went off to college, and this is why I was supremely uninterested in taking biblical studies as my track for my religion major. I just didn't care for it at that point in time in my life. Uh I was still a Christian, but I was wanting to stay as far away from my church as I possibly could.
And that is until I started dating this girl in my sophomore year. And she was Catholic. And I wouldn't say that I had a bad experience with Catholicism uh at that point. In fact, I had none, uh none whatsoever. Never been to a mass, uh knew little to nothing about the church itself besides some things I had studied. Really, the only thing I knew was a faint distaste for it, and that was with my what I had learned uh through the occasional conversations that came up in the Protestant churches I went to. And even they had no concrete reason for why the Catholic Church was bad.
It was more of an idea of they are different than us, so therefore they must be supremely inferior. But she invited me to go one weekend when I was staying over at her dorm room, and I agreed. So I but I told her I I don't have a suit uh with me. She said, Well, you don't have to, just wear what you got on. And that was kind of my first big shock. But we walked over to uh St. Teresa's and when we were entering the door, I almost bumped into someone, and I turned around to apologize hastily and realized that the person I'd almost bumped to wasn't a person, but rather an icon.
And that kind of shook me, because I had never experienced an icon in any way, shape, or form before. And it was an icon of uh Saint Teresa, almost life size, a little bit more diminutive than real life size, but but it was beautiful. And I didn't have a negative reaction at all. In fact, it was a very positive one. It was just more of a point of curiosity, but it kind of shook me off my game. And we went in and we sat down, and the mass proceeded, and of course I didn't know when to stand, when to sit, when to kneel.
But when the priest, Father Joe, got to the point where he said, Um please, you know, uh wish peace upon each other, and everyone began shaking hands and saying, Peace be unto you, that also shook me, and also in a positive way. I really like this. And the other major difference was that Father Joe that the church just wasn't led by the cult of personality that was Father Joe. Yes, Father Joe had a strong personality, he was an amazing guy. I really loved Father Joe. Um he had gone to my undergraduate, um, he drank and smoked like a fish.
Um there were many a times when we went and uh sat in his uh room and drank with him and told stories, had dinner with him. He was a really dynamic individual, but that wasn't the focus of the church. It was more as if he stepped into the background and let the mass say itself. And yes, there are differences in between Catholic churches and uh diocese and archdiocese. I mean, if you look at the difference between the Wit Richmond Archdiocese and the Arlington Archdiocese, and they are a world apart.
But yet even as radically opposed to each other as they are, I mean the Richmond Diocese is very left leaning, the uh Arlington Archdiocese are very right leaning, but both of those still practice that same mass. And it's the mass that takes the forefront. To me it was almost as if Mass provided a lattice work upon which faith can grow. And that appealed to me. So after a lot more positive experiences, I went and approached Father Joe and told him that I was interested in converting.
And it took me a year and a half to do that because I wasn't in a hurry, and I wanted to make sure that my newfound respect for the church was not in any way, shape, or form solely based upon my affection for this girl that I was dating. That would have been a a true horror for me for it just to convert because she was something. And I finally figured out that yes, this was a move that was for me, and a year and a half later I was brought into the Catholic Church.
During this time, I had also read a book for one of my uh religion classes that was by a uh a gentleman named Malachi Martin, who is a former uh Jesuit, well former priest, and he had written a book called Hostage to the Devil, The Possession and Exorcism of Five Contemporary Americans.
And I read that book, and even though I have always loved horror stories, ghost stories, whatever it is, that book gave me nightmares for six months afterwards because the things that it told, it wasn't that it was just scary to be scary, it described such alien concepts of demons that it it it shook me to my core, and this time in a very negative light. So anyway, I left college, went to graduate school, and started to attend this parish uh there in Boston and loved it.
It was led by a uh a Jesuit priest who I also knew from classes, and so one day after uh an intro class I went up to him and uh asked him what it was like to be uh studying to be a Jesuit. And we got to talking and he offered uh to teach me spiritual direction. And so once a week for a few months I went to the house in which several of these uh Jesuits were staying in, and he led me through some of the most powerful conversations about faith and prayer and how to pray that I had ever been through. And at that point I had decided that maybe the priesthood would be an option for me.
And it's something that we had talked about a good bit. But then I had two sour notes. So first the same church that I had been going to, um, my friend who had been teaching me spiritual direction uh stepped aside and another priest had taken over. And this priest had lofty aims, he wanted to make whatever work he was reading for mass be as inclusive as possible, but in doing so he was radically changing the literal scripture into something that was oftentimes wrong, uh, and B was just mangling it in the hopes of trying to include every pronoun ever known to humanity.
And I wound up walking out of those masses, not filled with faith and hope, but rather anger, a lot of anger. How dare this priest mangle such beautiful things? And if there was a a really good reason for it, I might understand, but he was just doing it to do it, and I I finally just wound up going to uh another Catholic church in the region. Luckily this was Boston, uh, which was you know very, very easy to find another uh Catholic church. Um and once again uh everything was fine again.
After I had moved back to Tennessee after graduate school, I had decided to approach the church for priesthood and drove all the way out into uh Gallanton, Tennessee, which is about an hour and a half away from where I lived, uh went to a church and met with a priest. And that priesthood interview did not go well because one of the things he the priest asked me about was what's the type of uh calling that is being spoken to you? You know, what's your particular mission that you really want to address as a priest? And I told him I want to help the possessed.
I really believe that people can be possessed and I however way, shape, or form I can help, I want to try to help. And I wouldn't say that I was laughed at, but I was pretty much told that's not going to happen. So my the thing that I had felt most strongly called for was immediately dismissed. And so I came up with a few others of oh maybe I'll help this group of people or this group of people, but it was all really hollow and shallow to my ears. And not the helping people is hollow, please don't take that.
But it's just that what I felt that has you know God had instilled upon me through my unique experiences upon this earth was now being openly laughed at. And so that was my last interview to be a priest. So I believe very strongly in this topic. To me, the ideas of demons are not just academic in nature, and if you disagree, that's great. I'm not saying that I'm right. Um in fact I uh uh I don't know if anyone could ever be right about this type of concept.
But this is it it really means a lot to me, to the point where I was willing to go and become a laughing stock to see if the church would have a place for me in order to serve in this kind of capacity. So I know this episode has gone long, and I I apologize for that, and also it was published late, and I apologize for that, but this is a pretty deep window into my soul. And I'm not entirely sure if I'm comfortable with releasing this out onto the planet, but uh luckily few people have listened, so that's kind of a relief.
But I really appreciate you sticking by this and listening to all of this. Um so what we're gonna do next time for next episode, episode five, we are going to get into some of the fundamental questions of what it is to be uh pertinatural, what it what a demon actually is, what's involved in the act of uh possession, and some of the things that really kind of drew me into that world. And hopefully this answers a few questions of why this is interesting, why this is not just an academic subject for me, uh, but also why I think that this is a highly worthwhile uh subject.
It's just not the fact that you know, some people can get drawn into this kind of topic because they, you know, it's a taste of the forbidden, or you know, for the shock value. And yes, uh in the very beginning some of those were the uh true for me, but now it's become a much more powerful uh factor. It's I really believe that there are is possession um and genuine cases of possession, and that these individuals need to be helped. So again, thank you for listening and uh hope you join us next time. Uh again, please feel free to contact us at southerndemonology at gmail.
com uh with any requests for topics, uh, for general feedback, etc. I'll take anything that you got, just hopefully not too negative, please. Um anyway, thank you very much and hope you have a great day. This has been Southern Demonology. Please feel free to contact us at Southern Demonology at gmail.com. We hope that you join us again for our next episode.