Are you interested in angels, demons, ghosts, spirits, and monsters? Are you curious about their origins, influence, and how to protect against the unknown? If so, then welcome to Southern Demonology, the podcast that explores all of this and more.
Hello all and welcome back to Southern Demonology and to the Wandering Road, as we are once again going to have a joint publication, which I thoroughly enjoy, even though Chris's presence isn't the greatest thing in the world, but you know, I deal with it. We all do what we have to do, right? How are you doing, Chris? I bring all of your listeners. Just kidding. You're probably accurate on that one to take. I don't doubt that whatsoever. They're definitely not here for my shining personality. How has your week been?
Oh, it's been bloody hell. I'll put it that way.
I know that feeling. As I was telling you right before the record button was hit. I've worked uh almost 160 hours in two weeks, and I am pretty much dead at the moment. So if I start lathering like a bloody idiot, just ignore me because it's just who I am now, apparently.
Well, no, I don't feel as bad. I probably I'm pushing maybe 95.
That's still a hefty chunk, don't yeah, because even like I was telling my wife last night how because she she's seen how absent I have been from everything. Luckily, she had her own stuff going on, and she was like, Well, now I feel bad because I don't feel like I'm doing anything. I said, It's not a bloody race. Um I know workaholics that treat it like a race, and I used to be like that, and I look back on myself and I go, No, no, no, it's not an accomplishment to work yourself to death for no bloody compens extra compensation or anything else. But here I am.
Oh, I hear you, but yeah, dude, I have a production checkout Tuesday night to deal with nine o'clock. It's supposed to end at 11:30. But the last one that took place for this project did not end until two o'clock in the morning. So I am not looking forward to that.
So when I used to work at College Board, all of our deployments were at night, in which I led every single one of them, and they didn't start until nine or ten o'clock at night. I've been on those calls, and I god, even back when I used to work at other companies, I still remember camping out all night long for like a major overhaul to the system which we were developing. And yeah, it uh I I don't wish that back on anybody.
And for my listeners and JJ listeners, if the topic we're talking about right now, our work life, sounds like hell, well, it ties directly into what we're gonna be talking about today, Mr. JJ.
Which is that's a clever aside, I like that.
Which is one of the best books I've ever read. If you want to scare yourself and have nightmares, read Hostage to the Devil by Father Malachy Martin. And for today, we're not going to go into each of the cases because that would take a very long time. JJ, what do you think? We could probably make a series about talking about this book, cover each case one episode at a time.
Yeah, I I like that, but today I wanted to tackle probably, and this is a big Herculean task in and of itself, is to tackle the biggest and most difficult part of the book, and that is the appendices, especially the first appendix. All of them are lengthy. I've said this before somewhere, and I don't remember if it was on your show, on a guest show, or even Southern Demonology. But this book, Hostage to the Devil, The Possession and Exorcism of Five Contemporary Americans, it radically changed my life. I was assigned to read this book in college under the amazing tutelage of Dr.
Blix, and it scared the ever-living the Jesus out of me. It has stayed a constant. I have always been interested in the strange, in those things that induce shock value, but this gave a richer purpose to my life, so much so that I almost entered into the priesthood in order to become an exorcist. And it was only after learning that that path isn't a guaranteed one did I back off from that. Needless to say, this book has had a profound impact upon me.
I thought it was time to begin discussing it rather than rather than as a an aside, but to do so as the main topic of conversation, if that makes any sense.
No, it doesn't. You just confuse everybody. As a matter of fact, I'm about to leave the recording and everybody probably just stopped listening. I'm kidding. Oh, so long, then I'm glad you didn't become an exorcist because you'd you'd be a lot more stressed out than you are now being a developer. Yeah, that's that's true. And one story I love to retell from my buddy over in Ireland who talks about his parents being friends with the priest that used to do exorcisms in I think like Zimbabwe or something like that.
The guy was in his late 40s, early 50s, but it took so much out of him that he looked like he was mid-70s. Like that is how much of a toll this type of work takes on people.
I've said it, Father Birdsong has said it multiple times. The work of an exorcist is one of loving sacrifice. Because, as Martin himself says, becoming an exorcist is offering yourself as a hostage, as Christ himself did for all of humanity, but you're doing it for just one individual.
But that is fascinating, isn't it? Just the whole concept of putting yourself out there. I wonder, you know how exorcists, you know, you're not supposed to be curious about certain things, you're not supposed to fall into temptation, let's say, like when the demon starts saying shit. You gotta admit, like, if it was me, I'd be terrified. How do you train someone?
Uh aside from the you know, the Roman rituals and the prayers that you can say to protect yourself while you're going through the whole entire process that Father Martin lays out, just if you ever sit there and just really think about to me, it would be really scary. Like, I I get scared, and you know, you hear a bump in the night, and it's like, oh shit.
But here you are willingly going into a home, a room, somewhere where you know you're face to face with something that has never been human, hates you to the highest degree possible, and wants to do nothing but harm to the individual that they're possessing, everyone in the room, and you, whether it that be not only physically, spiritually, and also mentally. There were some parts in the book in general where they're talking about a ritual of exorcism, someone being exercised, and they start throwing facts about the priest or other people that this person would not know.
So you have to have a really strong personality to not be phased by anything in order to do this. I just keep coming back to the fear aspect because you know the you know, a lot of people say, like, oh, you're not supposed to fear this stuff, but you're human, you can't help it.
And Father Martin answers that in the first part of the appendices where he is outlining the theology and even delves into it in the next section in which he's actually talking about the Roman ritual itself. But especially in that first part, the answer is that the exorcist himself is not confronting the preternatural, rather, he is just a vessel for God's blessing, for the divinity of Christ, in order to repel and expel the possessing spirit. Because Martin, who says you have your your human, you have your preternatural, which is much more powerful than anything we could ever bring to bear.
The most powerful is the supernatural, because that stems from God. That's really the only answer. In fact, the ritual itself and Martin says that a priest has to go to mass, he has to or conduct a mass, he has to go through confession, he has to prepare himself and be staunchly with God, and only then can one enter in. But if the ego of the exorcist comes into play, then all is lost. Because you have to be, you have to hold that tate, that shield of faith in front of you, which will then blunt any attack and protect you, not fully.
And to go back to what you were saying earlier, the harshness of these experiences, they draw something out of you. And I can cite quite a few different sources from this. First, you have Father Michael Strong in the book, who after his last run-in with the spirit who he had confronted twice in his life, each one of those experiences left him bereft of feeling joy. It sapped him totally.
And even the Deptera that perform rituals for the Ethiopic Orthodox Church, the ones that are responsible for protecting people from the demonic by using the demonic, they are said to die the most horrible deaths imaginable. I don't doubt that. I really don't. I wish I did, but I don't. In short, only God can keep you safe, but there's always going to be spell of God. Now, there is some incongruity there because you know Martin is said to have conducted countless rituals and he was untouched, largely untouched. Whereas others they can do one or two and they're gone.
And I don't know if there's ever gonna be a one-to-one because the spirits themselves are vastly different, but you know, we can get to that.
I want to backtrack a little bit, if that's okay with you. Yeah. To ego. The ego has to go out the door. Now, what comes to mind for me with that statement is that your ego can't be involved. At what point is it the priest's confidence in himself, not only himself in in God and the angels and Jesus, bleed over to his ego, being like, I'm not gonna let this thing get the best of me. It's a very fine line between confidence and belief.
Does that make sense? It does, but I I think it is a slightly wrong-headed beat. Because, yes, I mean, the the priest has to know that he is in the good graces of God, and no matter what's going to happen, he's going to be protected. I wouldn't say it's the confidence that protects him, but rather it is the servitude to God that protects him.
Yeah, yeah, definitely. Like the servitude to God. Yeah, the servitude, yes, but you always have to I'm assuming that you can't go into these things with you're scared and you're cowering. You have to go in, like you can't shake me because I have XYZ behind me.
Well, that's true. In fact, in the ritual itself, it says that at certain points that the priest will say authoritatively, will say confidently, and that is because he knows that he has the Trinity behind him. And that speaks to I think the very first part, which isn't technically labeled in appendix. I don't want to confuse people, but it's the section right before the appendix, which goes into the theology.
That's the part that is absolutely fascinating to me because Martin outlines probably the best theological takes that I have seen on this particular topic, and the theme of universality, deepness, and interconnectivity. Martin outlines, and I mean mo most confessions of faith do this as well, but it speaks to the worldview that as a believer you have, and for Catholics at least, it is that there is the Trinity, and the Trinity is it's not three gods, it's one God, but one God composed of three facets Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
And the idea of our humanness isn't defined by a set of psychoabilities that our bodies and minds produce, but rather it is that well of humanness, that soul, which delves deep into the foundations of Christ. And it was only because of Christ, and I'm not trying to be like religious or insist that Christianity is the only way. That's not what I'm doing. I'm just I'm espousing what Martin himself says.
Yeah, it's a piggyback off of that, JJ. Not trying to cut you off, just to reiterate what you just said. We're literally discussing today. I have the book in my hand, literally comes from the book Hostage to the Devil, just to make that clear.
Yeah, yeah. I'm not an apologist, I am not um witnessing to the majority to the people that are listening to this. Don't don't take it like that. Now, I I will be up front. I am a Catholic. Chris is a Catholic, but you're a better one than me. No, I am absolutely not. I've only just recently started this Lent season not eating meat on Fridays, and that's kind of the minimal activity that one could do, and I don't know. I already failed half the time.
I haven't eaten yet, but I'm sure I'm going to.
My mom always says, because my mom grew up like really poor, and obviously she's Catholic. She's like, Is God gonna stop you from eating what you have because of Lent? Are you gonna sit there and starve to death? So that's why she's uh never really subscribed to the whole not only eating fish on Friday thing. But anyway, go ahead.
Especially in this economic climate, dear lord, seafood is more expensive than anything else. So I can understand if someone doesn't have the means to partake in the well that and apparently you can eat copybotta no problem at all, even though it is meat because it's also an aquatic animal. But it's not a fish. It doesn't matter. The Catholic Church ruled that yeah, you can eat copy butter, no problem.
Yeah, to appease people, but but it's a mammal. Do you eat copybotta?
No, I would pet one, but I would not ever eat one. The one thing that I truly love about the theology that Martin presents is that level of interconnectivity because he ties the essence of being human back into Christ. In the modern world where everything seems to be surface level, to hear that deepening of experience. I don't know if I can adequately explain it, but it it really is soothing to me. It's it's like I have entered into mass and have knelt down on the kneeler, and I'm praying before the service starts, and that deep level of peace descends upon me. It it it smacks me of that.
It's almost like I can smell the the sandalwood incense. Something about that beckons to me undeniably. The one thing that Martin darts off this this particular section with is you know, I I find it interesting, is the fact that creation was not a series of depths that God took, but rather it is essentially it was constant. It was something that God knew about, that he would become a human, that he would validate humanity and rescue us from the shadows of death, essentially, at the beginning.
That is kind of implied with the moniker of omniscience, but the fact that he spelled that out, I really did enjoy.
I think the way that uh Father Martin lays out this entire section on good and evil and the manual of possession is really interesting. For example, Human Spirit and Lucifer, I found that section really interesting. Specifically when he's basically talking about like why did Lucifer rebel?
Yeah, a lot of people talk about why Lucifer rebelled, and they're put it in such concrete terms. Martin himself, he outlines like four or five distinct possibilities as to why. Was it rooted in conceitedness, wasn't it rooted in the refusal to serve, was it rooted in future possibilities of what humanity might become? He says one can only surmise, and I think that is absolutely true. We don't know the answer to that. All we know is that yes, he did rebel, and that becomes the central theme to that.
No, that is a good point, and here's the actual passage you're talking about. Or did Lucifer with angelic intelligence foresee a destiny of human beings yet hidden from our human eyes, that after eons of development, when outer spaces colonize in billions of galaxies, mankind will progress and evolve into. Spirit to a status we know nothing of, and in which men and women will enjoy a freedom from matter, but still be able to enjoy the beauty of this material world. Jealousy, ambition, pride, scorn, we can only surmise.
Thank you for finding that particular passage. Because one of the things I really admire about Martin is the fact that there's a level of humility in his writings, as it should be for a priest. Because a priest is not there to stand upon ego. I always think of um Amadeus, the scene where the cardinal is sitting and uh Mozart's father runs into the room and immediately begins to kiss the ring. It's not that level of authority. It is kind of my favorite principle when it comes to leadership. It is servant leadership.
Only by being a servant can you lead, only by making sure that those in which you look after prosper and you in turn be successful. The other thing that I really love, and I didn't realize until re-listening and rereading this particular part is that going once again to that theory of interconnectedness, and this is a view that I have had and I have espoused on uh southern demonology quite a few times, is that there is a difference between human evil and perturnatural evil, and the same thing goes for good.
Martin himself says that it's only by watching the divinity within us do our goodness manifest it, and it's the same thing here, but it's the reverse. In fact, this is the part I really want to hammer home because you will hear certain sects and denominations of Christianity who seem to be obsessed with the idea that there are always multiple demons, like I've heard even in our conversation last week with Brandon Morgan, when you were talking about the case in England where they said, Oh, you've got 48 demons trapped inside of you, and we got rid of 46, but there are two left.
To me, that is the absolute most wrong-headed way of thinking about this. And Martin addresses that directly because ProFootball is back, and so are the predictions.
While he goes into the universal belief of the Trinity, he also goes into the sometimes interesting way in which the both the Roman ritual and he refers to the evil spirit. And it's not as if he's talking about a singular entity, because you will often hear these things slip between I and we, but it's the fact that there's usually one entity that is the commanding presence. It doesn't really matter if there's one, if there's multitudes, if there's a legion in there, they're all kind of connected.
In fact, the ritual itself, essentially, uh every time an exorcist performs that holy rite, he is admonishing not just the spirit or spirits which are possessing that person in front of him, but he is admonishing the entire host of the demonic.
JJ, if I could interject really quick. Listeners, if you have the book and you want to follow along with certain passages on page 419 under Human Spirit and Lucifer to quote Father Martin, he says the evil spirits in question are not personal in that sense, being bodiless, their individual identities do not depend on a bodily identity. Christian teaching is that they think, will, act, and are self-aware and exercise their power purely, simply, and directly without the use of the psycho-physical.
So essentially, to me, what Father Martin is saying there, and to add on to what you're saying with regards to this page and this passage, is that these things don't rely on a physical identity. We think of them as an unseen physical entity. Am I correct in that assessment?
Well, and that's because we're forced to, because we have only known a physical identity, we're unaware of anything that is outside of ourselves because we are limited in only knowing ourselves. These things have never been human, are often grouped together, and that's because they identify as a group in addition to individually. We can only perceive them in such a way because that is what our experience tells us. That you know, as Martin himself says, if we talk about 217 million Americans, then we mean 217 million Americans. That does not apply to the demonic. Right.
No, that is correct, because it could be more, could be less. You don't know what you're dealing with.
Martin didn't expressly come out and say this, but it's what I took. And it goes directly into this idea that the demonic is both singular in a multitude, is that it is kind of a perversion of the Trinity.
Whereas you don't know what you're dealing with, all of these things are, yes, they are connected, but these are created spirits, and that's something which is a very vastly important item to Martin, because God is not a created spirit, and the demonic were generated as angels, and in fact, they were meant to be, at least what Martin says, they were meant to be uh servants to humanity, to be helpers, spiritual helpers to humanity, and as such, they retain that link to humanity, and that is one of the reasons why they hate us so vehemently to the point where and they hate us not just because of that link, but because of the depthness to that connection we have to Christ, and they abhor that.
And I don't think that hatred is something that we can even begin to grasp, to hate something so thoroughly that you want to see it corrupted and putrefied. I shudder to even think about it. Kind of like my hatred for the Red Sox. That's my favorite team. What are you talking about? It's like my hatred for the Patriots, I'll put it that way.
I mean, why are you wearing a Tom Brady jersey right now? I am absolutely not, I would never do that.
Dear Lord, don't make me come through this camera at you. I do it. Those were some of the like the main bullet points I wanted to get out that goes over the theological aspects to this and how that underpins every single story. And yeah, you can can read the stories that make up the first part of this book, and you can take a lot away from that. But I think that this is why we went from the backboard, because without knowing those underpinnings, you're not going to get as much out of those stories as you could.
Right. No, I think that makes sense because you have to understand, you have to understand the foundation, you have to understand the theology as to why certain things play out in each one of the cases.
It goes back to the exact same principle in which I say that if you pick up the Bible and just start reading it, you're gonna take some things away. That's absolutely true. But are you gonna understand the sits and leavens? Are you gonna be able to extract every metaphor, every reference, every simile? No, you're not, because you don't know the events and circumstances that the people who wrote these books lived through, and that is just as valid as the writings themselves.
That's why a certain point in time, only clergy were allowed to have copies of the Bible and allowed to read it. And it's not like they just sat through it and once they literally dedicated their whole lives to understanding the text, reading it multiple times multiple times over, and I'm sure that gets ingrained into your head when you have to manually copy it by hand so that there are multiple copies of the book in circulation for other clergy. I think you bring up a great point in that you can't just pick it up and you can't just read it. You could read it and go through the stories.
Absolutely. If you want to do that, you pick it up, you read it, you read the stories for what they are, you take the moral lessons from them. But if you try to apply your own theology, it's it's difficult, and you might end up doing something or saying something that it's like, whoa, this that's not what it's supposed to do. You're not supposed to use it to argue for the enslavement of people and justify the enslavement of people, which was done throughout time, or start picking up snakes and drinking poison and oh for f sake, don't get me started on that shit.
I had a co-worker who went to one of those when she was little, the snake things. Really? Yeah, they would have rattlesnakes walking around with rattlesnakes and passing them around. Like, what the f is wrong with you? She said she's seen people get bit and they just had to like drag them out and call ambulances and stuff. It's wild to me.
Yeah, that is when you take a metaphor and you apply it wholly inaccurately.
Yeah, and if you physically try to live by every single law, you're not supposed to mix and match clothing, you're not supposed to eat shellfish, you're not supposed to do certain things. So yeah.
626 laws.
There's not just 10. No, I mean, probably break uh 625 of them a day.
I may feel like that myself, more than not. I think that we have rambled on long enough. Let's stop here, and then the next episode will get into the Roman ritual because there's some fascinating aspects that Martin writes about with that, and we can actually discuss the ritual itself. But I am going to once again stress then you find this within this particular chapter, you find it when he's talking about the ritual. This is not something that can just be picked up and recited by anybody.
Like your dumbass did. You want to share that example for everyone?
Dear Lord, yeah. I've done it before, but I'll say it again. I did this, I made this very critical mistake because I did not take all the words to heart. Only those with the authority of the church, so has to be blessed by a bishop can do this. I've heard people say, Oh, you know, I have the authority, it's by my own authority. That is when you fall into very trubulent waters and you get yourself into major issues. I myself tried to do a possession of place by reciting this, and thank God nothing bad happened to me.
But I put myself into a very vulnerable situation that it's only by the grace of God that nothing did bad happen. Oh, that was great English, by the way. Nothing great bad happened. Yeah, I'm sorry.
Oh, I'm leaving that in. Before we wrap up, I want to ask you a question. Yeah. So we've all seen those TV shows where there's a person sharing their haunting experience, and there's like a reenactment of it. And then they talk about how they went around their house and they did a blessing and all that stuff. Isn't that kind of by proxy and really shitty attempt of an exorcism of locale? Isn't that dangerous in itself? You're walking around your home flicking holy water and saying something to the likes of in the name of God or in the name of Jesus, I cast you out of this home.
You do not belong here, you are not welcome here, type of thing. Isn't that equally dangerous? Because you see on these shows people saying, Oh, it's always good to bless your home, it's always good to do this, it's always good to do that. Isn't that kind of what you did in a sense that you open yourself up to be a target?
That's a very good question, and it kind of falls into a slight gray area. The and the reason I say that is the exorcism of place or locale falls into a lesser category of authority that's needed. For example, a priest does not have to get the approval of a bishop for that. The priest himself can decide to undertake this action by his own accord. But that doesn't mean that lay folk should be doing this willy-nilly. I I do think that it exposes the person that's doing it to a greater risk, and it could even open a door to the progression of possession. I like that phrase.
I'm gonna use that from here on out. Obsession, oppression, possession, and then I don't know if you can really say perfect possession is in that progression or not, regardless. Yeah, I think it is fundamentally a very dangerous move. If you don't know what you're doing and you don't have the authority of the church on your side, then it's a dangerous act. And that may be a controversial take, but I don't see how it could be anything but that.
It reminds me of folks that say, Oh, I I I believe and use the power of myself to get through like a cleansing of a home or something like that. You do realize this thing is not afraid of you, exactly.
And as Martin himself said, Well, the supernatural is more powerful than further natural, preternatural is a lot more powerful than any human could ever hope to be, or group of humans could ever hope to be. So you are deliberately on your own authority challenging something that could eat your lunch without any problems at all. Doesn't work like that.
It's very dangerous. One final thought that I have, and I think this could tie in perfectly after we complete going over hostage to the devil, exorcisms in other belief systems. It'd be interesting to cover that to see how they view it and the similarities.
It would, especially if we look at the how it's done through the other Abrahamic traditions, and then maybe skirting outside of that. Yeah, it would be an interesting set of topics to take on, but I think only if we can get subject matter experts to help us in that understanding.
Because I I would be really interested to hear how an imam would handle a possession case and how maybe in some certain situation someone is possessed by a jinn and there's no imam around, right? How would you know an exorcist handle that who is based in Christianity? Vice versa, you know what I mean? Because in the Islamic theology, I don't want to call dinn demons, they're a race of fire, they're a creation. Some of them are evil, some of them are good, some of them are neutral. So it'd be interesting to un try and understand how that overlaps.
Did you see that episode of evil that actually directly addresses this? No, no, I have not. It was really good, actually. There's a little girl who fires kept happening around her, and that's because she was being possessed by this vagina frit. And yeah, it it becomes a whole like plot line. Thing about evil is that it is a highly entertaining show. Some of its depictions are really interesting and unique. Do not attempt to read any kind of accurate lore from it. Same thing with like X-Files. Yeah, it presented a lot of ideas. They were all wrong, but they were still interesting ideas.
I used to have a field day like criticizing the X-Files for its takes on certain religious aspects back when I was in grad school because I was insufferable like that.
But you know maybe we could do an episode like that one day, debunking the X-Files.
That would actually be fun. I would like that. Anyway, I want to thank you all for listening to us ramble. I mean, this is a really important topic, and we're going back to some of the most authoritative sources, and I would dare say, at least within the last hundred years, the most important work that has catapulted taught of the demonic into the secular world that we find ourselves, and for that alone, it should be treated with respect.
No, I completely agree. And the last thing I'll say before you close out the show, JJ, if you have this book and you read the appendix, which we'll cover in depth next episode, don't look up the ritual, don't try it yourself, don't get yourself into any trouble. Whether you're a believer or non-believer, don't go messing with shit you don't know.
Someone who has done that, I urge you not to follow in my stupid example. So, uh, for listeners of Southern Demonology, where can people find you, Chris?
You can find the wandering road on Apple, Spotify, all major podcast platforms. If you want to reach us on TikTok, we are at TWR Podcast. If you want to give us a follow on Instagram, which I think you should, we are at TW Road Podcast. If you want to follow our Facebook page, just search the Wandering Road on Facebook, give us a like on there. You can reach us via email, which I know you want to. I know you have some stories, I know some of you are shy. Just shoot us an email. You don't even have to come onto the show. You don't even have to tell us who you are.
If you just want to send a blurb of whatever experience you had, same with JJ's show. This is a paranormal, supernatural, safe space. We're not gonna judge you. We'll talk about it, we'll provide some commentary like we always do. But under no circumstance will we ridicule someone for any submission that they send to us.
And the email I want to reiterate that this is a safe space, period.
Yeah, because I've been to told people things about my experiences, and they look at you like you have 10 heads. But our email address is twroadpodcast at gmail.com. Shoot us an email. We'll love to have you on the show, would love to hear your experiences.
And for Southern Demonology, we're of course on all major podcasting platforms. You can find and listen to, listen to all episodes and find our social links at southerndemonology.com.
Thanks for listening, all we really appreciate it. Share the show with your friends, like, subscribe, help us grow. We love doing this, and we would like to do this for many more years to come and make this our full-time gig and put out a great product for everyone that listens.
Highly accurate.
That would be nice. Hope you enjoyed today's episode. Hope you have a good one.
Stay safe out there. Thank you for listening to Southern Demonology. Find us online at Southern Demonology.com, which offers links to all of our social media and episodes. Southern Demonology is solely owned, produced, and edited by myself, and the intro and outro music are composed by me as well. If you have a moment, please rate, like, and share this podcast, as it is the best way to help support my work. As always, I am JJ, and it has been a pleasure to speak to you today.