Who is Your Demon and What Does He Do?

Summary

The Lord of Spirits Podcast: "Who is Your Demon and What Does He Do?"

Hosts: Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick & Fr. Stephen De Young
Date: February 14, 2025
Theme: The Seen and Unseen World in Orthodox Christian Tradition—How Orthodox Christianity understands demonic activity, temptation, possession, and the union of the seen and unseen.

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EPISODE OVERVIEW

This episode of The Lord of Spirits dives into the Orthodox Christian understanding of demons, demonic activity, and their relation to spiritual life and consciousness. The fathers revisit foundational material on the nature of spirits, clarify misconceptions about what demons are, how they work, and how these ideas have shaped both ancient and contemporary spiritual practices—including exorcism, prayer, and Christian living. Throughout, the hosts interact with listener calls, questions, and anecdotes, making the subject approachable, lively, and practical.

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KEY DISCUSSION POINTS & INSIGHTS

1. What Are Demons? Historical & Scriptural Foundations

• Levels of Consciousness:
  • Demons are a subset of "spirits," which are conscious entities above the human level. Animals have consciousness below humans; spirits are above (10:00–11:40).
  • "When we talk about spirits...we're talking about consciousness above the human level." (A, 11:30)
• Origins:
  • The Greek word "demon" (daimon) originally meant an ancestral spirit, not necessarily evil (17:00–21:00).
    • In ancient pagan contexts, "demon" could be positive/neutral; only later did Christianity attach negative connotations.
    • St. Paul: “…what the nations sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons and not to God.” (A, 21:10)
  • Jewish tradition historically rejected the notion of rebellious angels, viewing all spirits (including destructive ones) as acting under God’s command (22:18–24:50).
• Demons as the Spirits of the Wicked Dead:
  • Some demons are the spirits of particularly evil humans, especially those who became spiritual "children" of evil powers by participating in sin and debauchery (35:05–38:02).
  • St. John Chrysostom: "You become a demon after death by living like a demon before death." (A, paraphrased, 38:31)
• Saints vs. Demons:
  • Saints are not simply "good people;" they are the opposite of demons—those who fully align their wills and energies with God.

“Saint is the opposite of demon. Not the opposite of sinner.” (A, 39:25)

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2. Demonic Activity: How It Manifests

• Demons in the Noetic World:
  • The noetic (or spiritual) realm is primarily engaged not through physical phenomena, but through thoughts and the mind (13:47–14:25).
• Subtlety of Demons:
  • Demonic activity is rarely the Hollywood version—violent, dramatic possession. Demons usually work subtly, influencing thoughts and temptations (42:01–42:59).
  • Demons “play the long game"—their goal is to destroy humanity, often by gradual corruption, not obvious violence.

“Demons are not...cackling nutjobs trying to make everyone do the most evil thing all the time.” (A, 42:07)

• No Neutral Spirits:
  • In Orthodox tradition, there are no "neutral" spiritual entities like fairies; all spirits are either aligned with God (angels/saints) or not (demons) (43:17–46:13).

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3. Sin and Spiritual Residue

• Hauntings, Ghosts, and Sin’s Residue:
  • Sin leaves an existential, perceptible residue or taint in the world, experienced as oppression or unease, not necessarily requiring a sentient evil presence (46:13–48:40).
  • The Church responds through blessing, prayer, and sometimes exorcism—purifying and rededicating spaces and praying for the departed.

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4. Thoughts, Temptation, & Spiritual Warfare

• How Thoughts Work:
  • Ancient and Orthodox view: The mind (noûs) is a sensory organ, perceiving thoughts just as eyes perceive visual data (85:25–86:15).
  • Thoughts present themselves to us; we do not generate them at will. What we do with them—dwell, discard, form into ideas—is what matters.
• Distinguishing Thoughts & Ideas:
  • Thoughts = sense impressions received by the mind.
  • Ideas = how we process or combine thoughts; ideas are constructed and can be good, bad, or neutral (87:54–88:45).
• Demonic Influence in the World of Thoughts:
  • Demons primarily attack through thoughts (logismoi), introducing tempting, distressing, or false ideas (103:05–103:51).
  • Spiritual struggle is learning to respond properly—"accepting or rejecting airplanes at your airport" (104:11-104:19).
• Training the Mind through Prayer:
  • Prayer—especially the Jesus Prayer—trains us to focus the mind, shut out distracting or demonic thoughts, and cultivate single-mindedness (109:01–110:53).

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5. Spectrum of Demonic Activity: From Temptation to Possession to Participation

• Temptation:
  • We all experience demonic temptation through thoughts—this is the normal human condition (161:57–162:01).
• Torment:
  • When unaddressed, temptation can evolve into ongoing spiritual torment, as with Saul (132:42–134:17).
• Possession:
  • The loss of agency; a person acts under the compulsion of a demon, becomes subhuman, but is still a victim needing deliverance (155:11–157:00).
• Participation:
  • The most extreme state is when someone voluntarily aligns and synergizes with demonic energy ("the Nephilim level"). Such people become virtually demonic themselves (159:01–164:05).

"There's a spectrum: from temptation on one side to participation [with demons] on the other." (A, 161:33)

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6. Demonic Possession, Exorcism & Christian Practice

• Possession Defined:
  • Not mere influence or temptation, but a state where the person is no longer in control, their human agency overridden (155:15–157:55).
• Spectrum of Affliction:
  • Most people never reach possession; the vast majority are beset by temptation or torment.
• Exorcism:
  • Exorcism in Orthodoxy is not magic or psychological therapy. It’s a ritual severing of the relationship between the person and the demonic, rooted in Christ’s authority and enacted through prayer and sacrament (165:54–168:25).
• Everyday Exorcistic Acts:
  • Engaging in Christian life—prayer, worship, fasting, almsgiving—is deeply exorcistic. Holiness crowds out the demonic; there is no spiritual neutrality (172:50–173:49).

"The normal, everyday, ordinary acts of Christian life are actually electrified with spiritual power because Christ said that he would give us grace and save us through our faithfulness." (C, 173:10)

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NOTABLE QUOTES & MEMORABLE MOMENTS

• On the Demonic in History:
  “Hopefully by now...most of our listeners...have put Milton out of their minds. Because John Milton was a bit out of his mind. He was a Puritan. They’ll mess with your head.” — Fr. Stephen, 25:34
• On the Subtlety of Evil:
  “Demons play a long game. They're not stupid lunatics. You can subvert whole generations of people to evil and destroy them...as opposed to just, we're gonna blow the whole thing up in one giant, you know, death and destruction.” — Fr. Stephen, 42:16
• On Spiritual Residue:
  “Sin leaves a stain, a taint, a residue in the world. And that...we can actually experience it.” — Fr. Stephen, 46:22
• On Thoughts & the Noetic World:
  “Thoughts [are] like sense impressions...the mind is not just a computer in a box; it's a sensory organ.” — Fr. Stephen, 85:18
• On Synergy with the Demonic:
  “You can synergize with demons...in II Thessalonians 2:9...the Antichrist acts ‘according to the energies of Satan’—that’s synergy with the Satan right there.” — Fr. Andrew, 160:36
• On Christian Life as Exorcism:
  “All of the...normal Christian life—worship, prayer, fasting, almsgiving—these are all exorcistic acts...there’s no neutrality.” — Fr. Andrew, 173:10

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IMPORTANT SEGMENTS (Timestamps)

| Start | Topic/Discussion | |-------|------------------| | 10:09 | Review: Demons as subset of “spirits,” consciousness above humans| | 17:46 | Use of “demon” vs. “god” in ancient Greek, overlap, gradations| | 23:35 | Jewish vs. Christian views: demons as fallen spirits | | 34:38 | Demons = spirits of Nephilim (wicked dead), per Saints and Fathers | | 39:07 | Chrysostom on living like a demon before death | | 42:07 | Demonic subtlety, not Hollywood stereotypes | | 48:01 | Sin leaves existential residue/stain in the world | | 79:55 | World of thoughts: “thoughts” vs. “ideas” | |103:05 | The process: thoughts (logismoi) enter, ideas formed, choice follows| |150:19 | Tobit and Asmodeus: Story and background | |155:11 | What does “demon possession” mean, in practical terms? | |159:01 | Synergy with the demonic: ultimate spiritual peril | |165:54 | Exorcism in Orthodoxy: Not magic, not therapy—dealing with sin| |172:50 | Living the Christian life as the most powerful exorcism| |175:27 | Spiritual struggle: why “demons come back,” real change needed |

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CALLS & AUDIENCE INTERACTION (Highlights)

• [53:13] “Alexander from San Diego” — Discussing resurrection, relationships in the age to come, and implications for marriage and spiritual communion.

  • “In the resurrection, people are neither married nor given in marriage. He's not saying...you’re not going to remember each other...that love you had for each other is going to be gone.” — Fr. Stephen, 55:44

• [67:52] “Timothy” — Account of a demonic apparition; hosts advise focusing on the fruit (“did it bring you to repentance?”) rather than whether it was “real” in material terms.

• [74:30] “Daniel” — “Monster manual” question: what about ghouls and their relation to demons? Fr. Andrew explains ghouls as demonized humans, in line with the broader pattern of demonization through sin.

• [127:27] “Tyler” — How to discern if an apparition is a demon or a departed loved one; hosts: discern by the fruit (peace/repentance or fear/disorder?).

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FINAL REFLECTIONS

How Should Christians Respond to the Reality of Demonic Activity?

• The normal Christian life (prayer, sacraments, loving your family, charity, fasting) is itself exorcistic.
• There’s no neutrality—one either becomes more human (aligned with God) or less (aligned with evil).
• Repentance and active, positive engagement with the world and people crowd out demonic influences.

"If you try to replace something negative...with nothing, something insidious with nothing, it's not going to go anywhere. You have to replace it with something positive." — Fr. Stephen, 178:39

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Key Takeaway:
While the demonic is real and its activity pervasive, the most powerful antidote and path to wholeness is the disciplined, communal, Christ-centered life of the Church. Spiritual struggle is real; hope and victory are found not in dramatic deliverances, but in the day-to-day synergy with God through the fullness of Orthodox Christian life.

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For further exploration and detailed resources, revisit the episode's referenced earlier shows on “What is a Spirit,” “Monsters,” “Exorcism,” and the writings of St. John Chrysostom and other Fathers on the demonic.

Transcript

[A]

He will be a staff for the righteous with which for them to stand and not to fall. And he will be the light of the nations and the hope of those whose hearts are troubled. All who dwell on the earth will fall down and worship him. And they will praise and bless and celebrate with song the lord of spirits. First Enoch, chapter 48, verses 4 through 5. The modern world doesn't acknowledge, but is nevertheless haunted by spirits, angels, demons and saints. In our time, many yearn to break free of the prison of a flat secular materialism, to see and to know reality as it truly is. What is this spiritual reality like? How do we engage with it? Well, how do we permeate everyday life with spiritual presence? Orthodox Christian priests Father Andrew Stephen Damick and Fr. Stephen DeYoung host this live call in show focused on enchantment in creation, the the union of the seen and unseen as made by God and experienced by mankind throughout history. Welcome to the Lord of Spirits.

[B]

Hey.

[C]

Good evening giant killers, dragon slayers, cockroach and croachers. You are listening to the Lord of Spirits podcast. My co host, Father Stephen DeYoung, the Maccabees of the Monsters is with me straight from the swamp in Lafayette, Louisiana. And I'm Father Andrew Stephen Damick in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, perched precariously atop the arcane tower of podcasting, hovering dozens of stories, dozens above a disused gateway to the underworld.

[A]

I think this is an old hoagie shop, actually, actually pretty dramatic about it, actually.

[C]

Actually my building not only used to be apparently a furniture factory and showroom, but there actually was a mortuary, funeral home and crematorium down in the basement. So I'm not. Yeah, I'm not completely embellishing way beyond reality here. So it is true. It is true. We're live, everybody. And if you are listening to us live, you can call us at 855-237-2346 and you can talk to us. And we're going to get your calls in the second half of the show if you make them. And our very own, our truly beloved Matuska Trudy the Tank Richter will be taking your calls. Are you troubled by strange noises in the middle of the night? Do you experience feelings of dread in your basement or attic? Have you or any of your family ever seen a spook, pest, specter or ghost? If the answer is yes, then don't wait another minute, Pick up your phone and call the professionals. Tonight we're talking about demonic activity in the world, including temptation, torment and yes, even possession. So Father Stephen, aside from your Own trollish self. Is your house currently haunted by anything?

[A]

No.

[C]

Oh, well, success.

[A]

See, I live across the street from a graveyard. So like the ghosts are all wherever they died. People don't die in the cemetery usually.

[C]

Not usually. Not usually.

[A]

It's atypical for that to happen.

[C]

Dying to get in, as we have.

[A]

Seen some fights break out. Oh, oh, that's funerals, which is super classy. Like you and your cousin getting in a brawl.

[C]

Do they do. Do they do like in New Orleans? Do they do those. Those funerals with the guys walking along with the coffin and playing a band?

[A]

We haven't got.

[C]

We've gotten.

[A]

We've gotten some kind of low. A couple of low grade versions, but not the super high quality ones you get in New Orleans.

[C]

Oh, oh, oh. We have, by the way, we have people sounding off from St. Louis, Missouri, a guy who claims to be a Twin Peaks guy.

[A]

He is in Misery.

[C]

I hear they love company. Also from east Tennessee area. I'm not sure exactly where that is. Longview, Texas.

[A]

There's somebody in Longview, Texas.

[C]

Yes, yes.

[A]

A place where I spent many years.

[C]

Lisa. Yes. Lisa Jones. Is this someone you actually know? But that's what. Lisa.

[A]

It's not ringing a bell.

[C]

Lisa Jones. Not ringing any bell.

[A]

It's a long time ago. I'm an elderly man.

[C]

That's so someone. Someone listening from right here in Pennsylvania. Maybe they're somewhere in my building. It's coming from inside the house.

[A]

Coming. Yeah, See I actually congratulations on the local sports ball victory.

[C]

Yes, you're welcome. Oh, someone coming in from Wisconsin. Is this one Wisconsin? With the part of Wisconsin where they say the say milk rather than milk? I don't know. Oh, we've got someone come listening from Sweden. Huntsville, Alabama.

[A]

New York City turning into the end of Romper Room.

[C]

New York City. You know, the only thing that stands between me and New York City is New Jersey, which, I mean that's quite.

[A]

The barrier, but you could go around.

[C]

Got an Alaskan. Someone in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Hey, Blue Ridge Mountains, that's God's. God's own green earth right there. North Carolina, the Rockies, Walnut Port, Pennsylvania. Hey, that's actually just up the road from me. Oh, Lisa says that she doesn't know you personally. Someone from west, by God. Virginia. Wow. See, I start mentioning where people are from and then everybody, they all want to get Northern Virginia. That's not really Virginia. Just kidding. So what are we talking about tonight?

[A]

Well, demons, I know you didn't watch your local team's sportsball victory.

[C]

I Heard there was some kind of altercation with a pointy ball this past.

[A]

Weekend, but there were a number of things. I could boil it down for you. The number of things I learned watching the super bowl and the commercials.

[C]

Oh, what did you learn?

[A]

So I learned that Snoop Dogg.

[B]

And.

[A]

Oh, what's his face now? His name went right out of my head. Tom Brady. Oh, that Snoop Dogg and Tom Brady hate each other, huh?

[C]

Is that Snoop Lyon again, or is he back?

[A]

No, he's just Snoop now for a long list of reasons. There's a whole list of reasons why.

[C]

Like some kind of ongoing feud.

[A]

Two commercials where they list just all the reasons they hate each other.

[C]

Okay.

[A]

And it has something to do with them being anti Semitic. I don't even know how that works since neither of them are Jewish, but.

[C]

Wow. Back in back. Back in my stagehand days, actually, I. I worked. I think it was the last. Yes, it was the last one of the last stops of the last year. The first run of Lollapalooza. Snoop Dogg was there. Snoop Dogg was there as well as on the side stage. And I don't know who came up with this, but there was a band named the Orb, another one called Orbit, and then yet another called Orbital. Now, you can't tell me that wasn't on purpose. I bet those bands probably hated.

[A]

Hated that, but they probably hated each other.

[C]

Yes, yes. Like, there's a big feud.

[A]

I also learned that if you happen to be born with a skull shaped like a cowboy head.

[B]

Right.

[A]

You shouldn't be too sad. It'll be okay, because westerns will come back in style.

[C]

I guess these are references that I would have had to actually watch this.

[A]

And most importantly, most importantly, from the halftime show, I learned that all of us could take solace. No matter how bad your life gets. You could think to yourself, it could be worse. I could be Drake. Dude's having another bad year already.

[C]

Is he?

[A]

So. So these are the important things for any. Any of our other listeners.

[C]

I think.

[A]

I think there may have been a low rate of super bowl viewing among our listenership for some reason.

[C]

So here's the question that I'm going to put out there for. For the chat. Let the. Let people weigh in on this while we begin to have this discussion about spirits once again. Is Tinkerbell an Egregore? I'm just putting that out there for you in the chat on YouTube. Is Tinkerbell an Egregore? Sound off. Let us know what you think because. Yeah, just putting that out there. All right.

[A]

There are different versions of Tinkerbell. Is that relevant at all?

[C]

I mean, none of them are that old.

[A]

So like Julia Roberts, Tinkerbell versus.

[C]

It's true. You have to clap to make sure she exists.

[A]

Animated Tinkerbell.

[C]

I know. Tinkerbell's a murderer. I'm just putting that out there, by the way. Yeah.

[A]

You got kind of a grudge. Did something happen to you as a child while you were watching Wonderful World of Disney on the weekend? I could be like during the intro.

[C]

And now you're Tinkerbell, Tinkerbell and Wendy.

[A]

So anyway, yeah, we're talking about demons.

[C]

Yep, yep.

[A]

Not necessarily Tinkerbell.

[C]

Tinkerbell might be a demon.

[A]

Although I guess there's a poll going on now.

[C]

Yeah, People are like, what's an egregore? Come on, don't make me Google that for you.

[A]

Go, go. Yeah, go bother Pageau about that. Oh, man.

[C]

One person says Tinkerbell's a succubus.

[A]

Okay. That's. That's a self tell that we don't want to go down. Don't ask him any follow up question.

[C]

Darts. I know.

[A]

Ask him any follow up questions.

[C]

I know. Yeah, okay. Sorry. Sorry, everybody.

[A]

Yeah, so we're talking about demons. And so we're going to start by, as is our want, with a little review.

[C]

Yes, yes.

[A]

Pull together some threads from some older episodes which even if you listen to, if you listen to them in any semblance of order, you listen to a long time ago. Just because there are a lot of hours of Lord of Spirits between.

[C]

Yes.

[A]

Now and then. So when we talk about. So demons are all of the demons. All of the things we're going to be talking about under this subheading, demons is itself subheadings of the category of spirits.

[C]

Right, right.

[A]

And so when we talk about spirits as a reminder, we're talking about consciousness above the human level. And we've talked about. What we mean by that is we've talked about how contrary to say, 19th century worldviews where they thought and previous where they thought that animals were just sort of mechanistic machines that didn't have feelings or emotions or consciousness, we now know for certain that they do. I mean, anyone who's had a pet. Well, most pets. Some pets, sure. You know, but you got a pet iguana or something, you know, or you're the snake guy. Maybe not. But if you've had, you know, traditional animals, you know that they have some level of consciousness. Either a fun loving, warm consciousness like a dog, or a hateful, spiteful evil consciousness, like a cat. But they have, they have some level of consciousness. So there are levels of consciousness sort of below human consciousness.

[B]

Right.

[A]

There are ideas and concepts and things that humans can comprehend that they can't.

[B]

Right.

[A]

But consciousness is not just 0 or 1.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And so when we're talking about spirits, we're talking about levels of consciousness that are above the human level.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And part of what that means also that above is that. And we've talked about this in terms of your own body. Your own human body is a composite of organs and organ systems and bacteria that are actually separate life forms and all kinds of other things, sort of subsystems that operate according to their own regulation and therefore have some, in some cases, very low level of consciousness. Yet it's not like you sit and argue with your spleen, you know, or you tell, you have to tell your heart to work.

[B]

Right. That.

[A]

Human consciousness is itself in a way, not really a gestalt consciousness, but a higher order. The sense that it encompasses those lower level consciousnesses in our organs and the organisms that make our bodies function biologically. If we're. If you're in the same room with someone, your gut flora are communicating with theirs chemically.

[C]

I know, so creepy.

[A]

Not as creepy as the Mountain Dew seal commercial, but you didn't see that either. Anyway.

[C]

So I don't know.

[A]

No, it was him.

[C]

Okay.

[A]

They put his face onto the body of an actual seal.

[C]

Wow.

[A]

Using AI it was sort of a body horror thing. It was like a sequel to Tusk, but they were trying to sell me Mountain Dew. Anyway, so levels of consciousness above ours act upon and interact with human consciousness the way human consciousness interacts with those lower levels of consciousness that we were just talking about. And we're going to get into more of what that means as we go. So if you're like, whoa, right. You don't have to necessarily stop listening and go back and listen to the what is a spirit episode.

[B]

Right.

[A]

We're going to get back into this. But yes, this is a little bit of catch up so that we're at least, you know, you know what page we're going to be working from. And of course, spirits are part of the noetic world, the world that's perceived by the noose, sometimes translated as the mind. We're going to talk more about that in the second half, what exactly that means. So don't, you know, if you're, if you're not up to speed on that, don't worry, we'll get you back up to speed in The. In the second half, but they exist in the world of the mind of thoughts.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Meaning we. We don't primarily interact with them in a physical and material way.

[B]

Right.

[A]

The primary way you interact with demons is not by seeing them or touching them.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Or physically wrestling with them.

[C]

Right, yeah. Which is. I mean, that's the. I think that's the stereotype that a lot of people have of, like, that's what demonic activity is, maybe. Because it's like, that's the way it goes in movies, you know, or whatever.

[A]

Like End of Days, where Arnold Schwarzenegger shoots the devil with a grenade launcher. Right. Who can forget that? Classic. You know what his character's name is in that movie?

[C]

No, I don't remember.

[A]

Like, no one remembers the name of, like, any of, you know, except maybe Quaid from. From Total Recall, because you got the Quaid. Get off of Maz.

[B]

But.

[A]

This is just Schwarzenegger. Right. But his. His character's there. He's like a tough retired cop in End of Days whose name is Jericho Kane.

[C]

Oh, nice.

[A]

Completely believable.

[C]

Right? Wow.

[A]

But so anyway, yes. You can't actually do spiritual warfare with a rocket launcher, perhaps, unfortunately. But yeah, that. That doesn't work. We. You could talk about someone wrestling with their demons, but you're speaking of it in a different sense. Not an untrue sense, not an unreal sense, but a different sense.

[B]

Right.

[A]

So to put a finer.

[B]

On it.

[A]

Point on it.

[B]

Right.

[A]

What's a demon? We talked about this way back in the long ago time.

[C]

I mean, this is some of our earliest stuff.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. That's why we're reviewing a lot of. Some of this stuff is from, like, the first few episodes.

[C]

So 2020, you know, different world. That was.

[A]

My power went out halfway through the episode anyway.

[C]

I know.

[A]

So, I mean, you probably didn't even get this the first time, let alone. Yeah, yeah. But so what, right? What is a demon? So, of course, originally, we're talking about the word demon in Greek, which technically means something like an ancestral spirit. The way that term is used is closely related to the way that Theos. Right. That we translate as God with either a lowercase or a capital G, the way it's used, in fact, there's overlap, right? There's overlap. There's not. There's not always a super clear distinction between the two. Sometimes those terms are used for the same being, and it's distinguished based on activity and that kind of thing. On the whole, in general, generally, there's tons of exceptions to this, but in General daemon is used to refer to a lower level. If someone is using both the term theos or thei, the plural, we'll talk about gods and then also talking about daemonis.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Demons, as we would transliterate it. The daemonis is referring to a lower level of beings than the beings that they're referring to as the. As gods.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Kind of greater, lesser spirits. Yeah.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Now, again, there's tons of exceptions, though. Like there are places where Zeus is referred to as a demon.

[C]

Sure.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And what's going on there is not. It's not purely that the words were interchangeable, it's that there's a memory there of a couple things. One being that, you know, Zeus has like three birthplaces. So there are actual ancient Greek kings who were sort of assimilated into Zeus.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Into this thunder God. So there's this memory of him being this ancestral spirit.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Having been this sort of ancient king at some point in the distant, murky ancestral past. But then also there's the memory of. Remember, there's the Titans, including his father Cronus or Kronos, and then there are the Olympians, who are the children of the Titans. And so in that relationship, Right. The Titans would be the higher order or the more ancient or.

[B]

Right.

[A]

The greater level of spirits, and the Olympians would be the lesser. So there's a connection there, too. So when you find Zeus or Apollo being referred to as demonis, it's usually in some context where that memory is at issue somehow or is in the background. So that means that in. In purely Greek contexts.

[B]

Right.

[A]

In pagan Greek contexts, there was not a negative. There's not a sense of opprobrium attached to that word.

[B]

Right.

[A]

When you say demon to someone now, they instantly think evil.

[C]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, in a lot of, like, ancient Greek texts, if someone said, I have a demon, that would be like saying, I have a special wise person who tells me important things.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Like Socrates was given to us. According to Socrates.

[B]

Yeah, right.

[C]

He was very happy about that. Yeah.

[A]

So that was not necessarily a. A negative thing. It becomes a negative thing in a Christian context. The term doesn't get used a lot in Greek second Temple Jewish writings. It does sometimes once you get to the Greek period, not just like people writing in Greek, but post Alexander the.

[B]

Great.

[A]

You start getting it used to refer to what or otherwise referred to as, for example, unclean spirits more commonly. But it's really in the Christian context. So for example, when St. Paul says, what the nations sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons. And not to God.

[B]

Right.

[A]

To demones and not to God, singular.

[C]

It's an own. On his. On Paul's part, like saying, you guys sacrifice to lesser spirits.

[A]

Yeah, well, but also. So a pagan would kind of have to agree with that, right?

[C]

Yeah, sure, sure. Like, yeah, yeah.

[A]

We're children of a less spirit. Yeah. We do not to the God of Israel. We're not sacrificing to the God of Israel. We're sacrificing to devotees.

[B]

Right.

[A]

So it's kind of an incontrovertible point.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And so because of that distinction.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Because with the spread of Christianity, the worship of daemonis becomes a thing opposed to the worship of the true God, the capital G, God, then daemonis takes on this negative character.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And that's why we now think of it in that. In that way.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And in fact, this causes a lot of confusion if you start trying to look into the Jewish understanding of.

[B]

What.

[A]

We would call demons. Because as we've talked about on the show before, the Anakin tradition and the stuff about fallen angels gets repudiated very early during the period of the formation of Christianity, such that already by the time you get to St. Justin's dialogue with Trypho, Trypho is saying, you know, you goofy Christians think that angels rebelled against God.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Because. And it is true that now Orthodox yuzhi is that there are no angels who rebelled against God. So the beings that we would consider demons, even the unclean spirits and this kind of thing, are not considered to be spirits in rebellion against God in a Jewish context. They're just considered to be angel, the same as angels. They're just spirits like angels are. They all do God's bidding. Just some of God's bidding is unpleasant from our perspective. And so there's a very different.

[B]

Right.

[A]

But that develops out of. We've talked about this in the context of the Old Testament. They're not getting that out of nowhere.

[B]

Right, right.

[A]

We've talked about the sort of Old Testament theodicy that these demonic powers, these spiritual powers of evil that are at work in the world, God sort of has them on a leash and makes them do his bidding.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And so the current Jewish view develops out of that. If you take that and you strip away the Anakin tradition and the way in which those traditions find their way into the New Testament, that's what you're left with.

[B]

Right.

[A]

So that's the reason for that disagreement. But they still don't have that understanding of sort of spirits that have rebelled against God. That's been sort of. They sort of excised those Anakin ideas from their tradition. And it's fair to say excised, because there are some cases where Orthodox Judaism is just continuing. The sect of the Pharisees.

[B]

Right.

[A]

The Pharisees obviously had their own particular beliefs. And so there are some things that the Pharisees sort of never really thought fully accepted. There are other things that a 1st century Pharisee would have been comfortable with. See, for example, St. Paul, that a third century Orthodox Jew would have become much more uncomfortable with.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

Like things within the Jewish tradition.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Like those are the things that Multiple.

[C]

Persons of God, for instance.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. Multiple. The idea of multiple persons of God.

[B]

The.

[A]

And of course.

[C]

This.

[B]

Right.

[A]

The idea of rebellious or fallen angels.

[C]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

So that said, again, this is one of our very early episodes, but we talked about the different angelic rebellions, plural. Hopefully by now, this show's now been running for a few years. Hopefully most of our listeners who aren't brand new listeners have. Have put Milton out of their minds. Because John Milton was a bit out of his mind. He was a Puritan. They'll mess with your head. And this idea that, you know. Well, there's a whole nexus of ideas there that there was some. Before God created the earth, there was some primordial fall of Satan and a bunch of demons into hell. The idea that Satan like rules hell.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Instead of being imprisoned there. I mean, even in Dante's Inferno, he's imprisoned there.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Like this whole idea that he rules there and he's sort of this almost romantic, you know, political revolutionary or something. That's all Miltonian nonsense.

[B]

Right.

[A]

You can enjoy his prose, you can enjoy his. I'm not big on English lit, but feel free to enjoy as fiction. Feel free to enjoy it as fiction. It is fiction, but it is fiction. There's no connection to the Bible. Even though a lot of people grew up, even people who grew up in churches who say everything they teach is based on the Bible being taught that even though it's nowhere in the Bible. So we talked about how these angelic rebellions are things that are connected, that begin after the creation of the world. We could give the St. Andrew of Crete quote again in his commentary on the book of Revelation, when he's talking about Revelation chapter 12 and the fall of the devil, he says we must accept, as all the fathers teach, that after the creation of the world, the devil fell through envy. The church fathers have various days, various creation days to which they link the creation of the angels mostly the first day and the fourth day, though there's a minority report for the second day. But the idea being that the angelic creation happens as part of the creation of the world. And the beginning of angelic rebellion with the devil begins in Genesis 3.

[B]

Right? Right. And.

[A]

It'S connected, that rebellion. We're going to deal with this some more, both in tonight's episode and in our follow up episode two weeks from.

[B]

Now.

[A]

That because of that, these angelic rebellions again, we don't know what it's like to be an angel. Don't know what it's like to be a bat. You don't know what it's like to be an angel. So we don't know how angels experience time since they don't have bodies, they don't age.

[B]

Right.

[A]

They don't have material bodies like ours. At least they don't age.

[B]

Right.

[A]

They don't experience materiality in the same way, they don't experience flux of change. So how they experience time, we don't know.

[B]

Right?

[C]

Yeah. All we can see is what we can see. I mean, it's just like you and I can have lunch. I don't know what it's like to be you. I can see you eating your lunch. I. I can see you hear you talking to me, but I don't know what it's like to be you. Thank you.

[A]

You don't know what it's like to be me. Let's get to the point. Oh, I can't say the next line.

[C]

No, you may not. Yes.

[A]

But so these angelic rebellions, right. Are connected to and manifest themselves at certain points in human history.

[B]

Right. And.

[A]

But we're putting it that way because to say that, okay, so the devil fell on the day that Adam fell, whether or not we know what day that is.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Matthew, Henry could tell you exactly what day of the week that was. I'm just dunking on Puritans tonight for no reason. But whatever day that was, that's the day the devil fell.

[B]

Right?

[A]

The problem with that kind of thinking is that kind of absolutizes time.

[C]

In.

[A]

The sense that, right. God and everybody created.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Like experiences the flow of time in the same way.

[B]

Right?

[A]

So like God creates on the third day, and the third day was April 3, 4004 BC or something.

[B]

Right?

[A]

That's when God created all the animals. Boom.

[B]

Right?

[A]

That misses the point. And this isn't a modern thing. This is. St. Augustine makes this point, right? He says, what does it mean to say that God did something On a day?

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Like, he wasn't doing it before, and then he stopped doing it.

[C]

Check his calendar.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And he did.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Like, doesn't follow. But we could say. We could say that God's actions, the divine activities.

[B]

Right.

[A]

God's actions manifest themselves in our human experience in particular times and places.

[B]

Right.

[A]

So part of God's creation of the world was creating me.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

But I was born on June 16, 1975, and presumably conceived nine months earlier.

[C]

Are you sure you didn't, like, incubate for 10?

[A]

I said presumably.

[C]

I'm just putting that out there.

[A]

Plus, it's give or take nine months. I think I was late. But anyway, yeah, I came out weighing 10 pounds and with teeth. No lie. I was born with teeth.

[C]

Whoa.

[A]

See that?

[C]

That only feeds into the whole Nephilim.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. You know, the folk tales and legends continue to grow, but that is a true fact. You could ask my mother.

[C]

I will ask your mother.

[A]

I know your mom. She will verify this. She was the victim of it, but.

[C]

Poor woman.

[A]

But anyway, you go back 10 months before that, and I didn't exist.

[B]

Right?

[A]

So did God create me at the moment I was conceived? Or did God just create me and then that was the moment in time when I came into being in the world of. In the material world that we all experience.

[B]

Right.

[A]

That's the distinction we're making.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Because otherwise you're gonna have a real hard time reconciling God created the world and everything in it in six days.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And then synchronizing that with he created you and me and the tree in my backyard and the grass.

[B]

Right.

[A]

If he created that during the six days, that he can have also created on this day, if you're going to absolute absolutize time. So angelic actions likewise sort of manifest themselves to us humans in terms of our human experience and human history at some particular point in time. And in one of our early episodes, you could tell based on the title, there are actually 5ish times when angelic beings fell.

[C]

Yeah. Yeah. The ish being, it might have. It might have been one being falling two different times, or it could be two different beings.

[B]

Right?

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Right.

[A]

So you could go back and listen to that episode if you want, write some more detail on that. But again, these are just reminders, though, and all of those. The point here, though, being for tonight, all of those angelic beings from all of those four or five episodes that it says those are all things that get called demons.

[B]

Right.

[A]

So the devil is referred to as a demon. The prince of demons.

[B]

Right.

[A]

This kind of thing. The other demons who fall.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Who are referred to by as the watchers, the angels who left their former estate in the time of Noah.

[B]

Right.

[A]

From the New Testament, those are referred to as demons. So demon gets used for sort of all of those beings. Demon also gets used. And hopefully, as the show goes on, this will get less and less controversial because this is just a thing. Demon is also used to refer to the spirits of certain dead humans.

[C]

Yep.

[A]

And these dead humans, regardless of sort of who they are, who are referred to as demons, are the sort of children of those fallen angelic beings. That does not mean literally. Well, it does not mean in the biological sense.

[C]

Right.

[A]

It is literal, but not biologically.

[C]

Biologically literal. Yeah.

[A]

Yeah. Because, for example, your adopted children are really your children.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Right.

[A]

But they're not biologically your children.

[C]

Your dogs are not your children. Your cats are not your children.

[A]

My dogs are my dogs, people. My dogs are my dog. One of them is an alien. One of them I'm not sure is actually species Canis.

[C]

Uh, I'm convinced one of them is a cat. That one of your dogs is my dog, Wendy.

[A]

Just a long series of bizarre behaviors. And they found her wandering in the woods, literally. So, like, I kind of think her people may have left her but. And flown back home. So when we're talking about their children, Right. The obvious thing, because people get excited, people are probably running to. Is the Nephilim. And this is true.

[B]

Right.

[A]

This is a case. And as we've talked about on the show, that also is not saying that these are the biological children of angels and humans, but these are children that were born through demonic sexual ritual.

[C]

Yes. Involving two humans at least.

[A]

Yes. To be a bit euphemistic. The. But this also includes, you know, various other figures referred to as the sons of perdition.

[B]

Right.

[A]

You don't have to have been born from that.

[B]

Right.

[A]

A lot of times people think, oh, okay, so, yeah, it was this ritual. So they try to sort of backdoor a biological definition that way.

[B]

Right.

[A]

So like, any kid who was born out of one of those rituals is just faded to become this demonic evil being.

[C]

Yeah. Because apparently magic is real. Like magical formulas actually apparently do work, you know, but.

[B]

Yeah, right.

[A]

But there is a participation going on that we're going to talk about more tonight.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

And so there are other people who were not born out of any kind of ritual like that per se, but who, through participation with demons, become the sons of those demonic beings. Right. We talked about sonship Exactly.

[B]

Right.

[A]

The image.

[B]

Right.

[A]

The participants.

[C]

I mean, Jesus says to some of the leaders of the Judean leaders of his time and place that they are sons of the devil. And he does not mean by that that they were born from, you know.

[A]

Pagan rituals, but that they were as evil as those who were.

[C]

Right.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Of old.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And of course, there's the St. John Chrysostom quote that we've given several times.

[C]

On the show, which basically he says, you know, some people say that if you get. If you die in a violent way, then you become a demon after death. That's not how you become a demon after death. You become a demon after death by living like a demon before death.

[B]

Right.

[C]

To paraphrase a little.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Yeah. He's sort of answering the belief that kind of still exists, although it's ghosts. Right. Now that someone dies a violent death, it's sort of their spirit looks for revenge or haunts the place or something. There are people who believe that, who he was preaching to, he says, that's not how you become a demon. You become a demon by living like a demon.

[C]

That's not how this works.

[A]

And so. Right. This category of demons begins with the Nephilim and those destroyed by the flood. But this includes figures ever since.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Judas is referred to as the Son of Perdition.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Which is language picked up from the book of Jubilees to refer to the Nephilim. And as we've talked about relatively recently, compared to this other stuff on the show, a demonized person like this is sort of an anti. Saint.

[B]

Right.

[A]

We talk about saint not being the opposite of sinner, but saint being the opposite of demon.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And we'll talk more about the saint side of that in a couple of weeks here. But so, as we just alluded to.

[B]

Right.

[A]

There's a distinction, and St. John Chrysostom was making it in his own day in the 5th century between sort of popular ghost ideas and demons.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And a question we get from time to time, fairly frequent, not as much as we used to, but we get questions about ghosts.

[C]

I was saying knowledge is getting out there.

[A]

Yeah. We get questions about ghosts and haunted things and different experiences people have had with ghosts. Meaning like the spirits of the dead. Not so much spirits of dead loved ones, but things that are more like St. John Chris Austin was talking about.

[C]

Oh, so less like Patrick Swayze and more like the other guy.

[A]

Yeah. It's like, you know, there's this house or this building or this basement or this place in the woods where some person or Persons, you know, does H try and monetize this on YouTube?

[C]

I don't remember.

[A]

I think so. I think it actually. Well, not anymore. So someone's committed suicide and people say, oh, when you go there, you know, it's like, haunted by the spirits of those troubled souls. Right. Still.

[B]

Right.

[A]

That kind of thing where it's sort of activity or experiences that you wouldn't call angelic or positive.

[B]

Right.

[A]

But also don't seem to the people to be necessarily demonic, at least as they understand demons.

[B]

Right.

[A]

We have to remember also that demons can be subtle.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Demons are not just all cackling nutjobs running around trying to make every person do the most evil thing possible all the time.

[B]

Right.

[A]

That was another question we've gotten, is, you know, if. If in these pagan parts of the world, they're still worshiping demons, right? Why? Why? How do they have any kind of functioning society? And it's like, well, because demons play a long game, right? They're not stupid lunatics, Right? And you can subvert whole generations of people to evil and destroy them, you know, the way they do, as opposed to just, we're gonna blow the whole thing up in one giant, you know, death and destruction.

[B]

Right.

[A]

In one generation. So what we need to understand is that in addition to the. The actual spirits involved, Right. Angelic or demonic spirits. And there's not. There's not really a third category of spirit.

[C]

Sorry, everybody.

[A]

Yeah, a lot of people want there to be a third category of spirit. Because they're into fairies or something.

[C]

Yeah, I mean, yeah. Like, this idea of neutral spirits, you know, like, oh, well, they're. They're not taking sides. I'm like, that's not a thing. Because God created everything to do what he created it to do. And so you're either obeying what God made you to do, or you're not. You know, it can't be like, no, I'm gonna kind of go off and do my own.

[A]

Sorry, Shakespeare fans.

[C]

Yeah, Yeah. I mean, what I tell people, they're like, but there's all these stories. I'm like, yes, they are stories, and they function in the stories for a particular reason, narratively, within the story. But. But if we're talking about real spirits in the real world, not just stories, again, they're all created by God. They're either doing what God told them to do, made them for, or they're not doing that. So there's no third option.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

I'd have to study this a lot more. And I'm not going to. Because I'm not that interested. But I think a lot of those kind of stories actually emerge.

[B]

At.

[A]

In the early modern era. So, like, where you have real neutrality.

[C]

Yeah, yeah. I think, you know, the stuff that I'm familiar with that's on the medieval side of things, the way that it sometimes gets played out. And I only discovered this because, well, you can imagine the way it gets played out is that a fairy tale will actually ask a priest, believe it or not, whether they can be saved. And the priest will respond, well, we'll find that out at the end of time, basically. So the context of that kind of encounter. Right. Is not like true neutrality. It's.

[A]

It's suggesting a fairy as if it's like an animal.

[C]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

Like a conscious animal.

[C]

Exactly, exactly. Right. So. So, you know, I'm not aware of any. At least within the Christian tradition and, you know, like Jewish stuff, I'm not aware of anything earlier than that. But I mean, again, I like you, I have not made a serious study of it being interesting.

[A]

It seems to me, like when you get into the early modern period, and I mean the very early modern period, like the 16th century.

[C]

Yeah, sure.

[A]

You start getting this desire to bring back some of the pagan spirits and not see them as demons.

[C]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

And try to set them apart in this third category.

[C]

Right, right. I mean, basically, it's. It's a world in which there is no most high God that's an absolute creator of all things.

[B]

Right.

[C]

Because once you have that, then you're. Then. Then who you are and what you are exists in relation to him.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

And that's how it is. That's how it is. Yeah, yeah.

[A]

So.

[B]

But.

[A]

So there's no third category. But aside from the angels, demons, we also have to take into account the fact that we've talked about this in terms of atonement.

[B]

Right.

[A]

That evil, that sin, these things in the world leave a stain, a taint, a residue in the world. And that taint and stain is an existential reality in the sense that we can actually experience it.

[B]

Right.

[A]

I think most people have had the experience of walking into a place. There's nothing visually wrong with it.

[B]

Right.

[A]

It's just a house that looks like any other house or building that looks like any other building, but having the firm impression that there's something wrong there and they should leave.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And if you ask the person who's had that answer, well, what exactly is it? Point to the thing in this room that is wrong or that is bad or that you're Running away from or what it is. They can't. There's not something.

[B]

Right.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

That you can point to.

[C]

Yeah. I like, I remember. I remember when I. My first trip to. To Lithuania, actually, in Vilnius, there is a museum that was a Nazi and then KGB headquarters, you know, for. In prison. And there was a room in which they would take people and shoot them in the back of the head. And I mean, I could tell you, like, I had a. When I walked in the room, I was like, oh, this place is bad.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. That's a common.

[B]

Right.

[A]

But that's an experience. The reason you can't point at it is our experience goes beyond just the material world.

[B]

Right.

[A]

That noetic world that we started.

[C]

That's right.

[A]

This first half talking about.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Our experience includes that.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And so a lot of the things, the experiences people have that are related to ghosts or hauntings that don't seem clearly demonic, a lot of them are that. So, for example, if you're talking about a place where someone did something horrible to themselves or someone else, there's a kind of spiritual residue of that. And the way the church has always responded to that kind of thing is by coming and purifying and sort of rededicating that place.

[B]

Right.

[A]

With holy water, with prayer.

[B]

Right.

[A]

That can include. Right. If it's a place where someone did something horrible, that can include prayer for that person.

[B]

Right.

[A]

As part of the process. If you remember back to the canons about vampire hunting.

[B]

Right.

[C]

Some of our new listeners are like, wait, canon's about vampire hunting?

[A]

Yes. Find that Halloween episode.

[C]

Yeah, I think that was our first. First Halloween episode, maybe.

[A]

No, I think it was the second one.

[C]

Second. Maybe. Okay.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. So.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And so that's how the church sisters responded to that kind of thing.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Is you purify the place and sort of cleanse it from that and rededicate it and pray for whatever people were involved.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And that's not saying that there is and was no demonic activity involved.

[B]

Right.

[A]

It's very likely if someone did something horrible to themselves or others, for example, that there were demonic spirits involved in that person getting to that point.

[B]

Right.

[A]

But it's not just a case of, oh, there's a demon living in my basement always.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Or there's a demon attached to this old coffee can.

[B]

Right.

[A]

That our PK meter will detect. So it's not that there's a middle category of spirits. It's not even that there's a middle category of things. It's that sin leaves a stain still.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And that's something that needs to be purified and cleansed. It doesn't just go away by people ignoring it.

[C]

Yeah. Yep. Yep. All right. Well, we're going to go ahead and take our first break and we'll be right back with the second half of the Lord of Spirits podcast.

[A]

Father Andrew, Stephen Damek and father Stephen DeYoung will be back in a moment to take your calls on the next part of of the Lord of Spirits. Give them a call at 855-237-2346. That's 855-AF-RADIO. How do you explain the sacraments? It's easy to say they're mysteries that we have to take on faith or on the authority of tradition, but that is not how the early Christians understood them. To them and to all ancient people, the idea that physical objects had spiritual power was very intuitive, whereas modern people tend to find this difficult, bizarre or even unchristian. This is because we live in an era shaped by secularism, a way of viewing a world that's incompatible with sacramental thinking. Because secular ideas are at the heart of our culture, modern people tend to think in secular ways without realizing it, even the most well meaning of us.

[B]

How then do we live in but.

[A]

Not be of a secular culture? We need to understand the enchanted sacramental way that the early Christians viewed the world, but we also need to understand secularism. What is it really? Where did it come from and how does it influence how we think about religion? Journey to Reality Sacramental Life in a Secular Age breaks down these important issues in accessible, non academic language and is an ideal introduction for for young readers, catechumens and seekers, as well as for any Orthodox Christians who want to deepen their understanding of the sacraments. Journey to Sacramental Life in a Secular.

[C]

Age by Zachary Porcou, now [e-mail] Again.

[A]

That is store.ancientfaith.com we're back now with the Lord of Spirits with Father Andrew, Stephen Damick and Father Stephen DeYoung. If you have a question, call now at 855-237-2346. That's 855-AF-RADIO.

[C]

Hey, welcome back, everybody. We're talking about demonic activity in the world and we just finished up doing a bit of a recap of some of a wide variety of things related to this from from a lot of our earlier episodes. And we're going to actually take a couple calls. So first we have Alexander calling from San Diego. So, Alexander, welcome to the Lord of Spirits Podcast.

[D]

Bless fathers, God bless you.

[A]

Are you in San Diego proper or are you in like, north.

[D]

I'm right on the border of. Yeah, that's right. I'm in North County. I'm on the. In San Diego county, on the north edge of the proper boundaries of the city of San Diego. But just for simplicity. Yes. So I wanted to follow up on Father Stevens characterization of the resurrection of the body and how one way to think about it was that it was reconstituting our relationships. And so what really sparks my interest there is when the Sadducees challenge Jesus about the resurrection and they bring an example of marriage. And marriage is really tied up with relationships and everything. And they challenge Jesus on that. He tells them, oh, you err for, you know, everything else he says, and he says they'll be like the angels in heaven. And I think a lot of people take that, take that versus just as a negative sense, oh, angels aren't married. But I don't know if that's really even maybe what Jesus means. I think there's a positive meaning there. Maybe. I think I'm thinking of a psalm where righteousness and peace have kissed each other. It feels like that the virtues and that maybe that the principalities there, they have a deeper communion that's maybe closer to maybe kind of the end goal of marriage in the first place. So I don't know. I just wanted to. Wanted to comment on how Father Stephen's characterization of the resurrection of the body relates to what Jesus teaches there.

[C]

That's all you, Father.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

You don't want to try and get them. Actually, I don't know.

[C]

I mean, it's interesting to me how much this thing that you said at Peugeot Fest has legs. Yeah.

[A]

Usually people forget this stuff. I say no. Yeah. No. So I'm glad it's got. People think because that was again, the purpose. It's a way. And I'm glad you said it the way you did because a lot of people didn't understand that, that it's a way of thinking.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

It's not claiming to be like this is it?

[B]

Right.

[A]

But so what, what Christ actually says, there is. He says in the resurrection, people are neither married nor given in marriage.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Which would be married would be the male version and given in marriage would be the woman.

[B]

Right.

[A]

But married is also passive.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Because you have to remember these are all arranged marriages. So what Jesus is literally saying there is marriages are not contracted in heaven. He's not saying, oh, oh, you and your wife are going to completely Forget each other in heaven. Like, you're not going to recognize each other. You're not going to remember any of that time you spent together. That love you had for each other is going to be gone.

[B]

Right.

[A]

You're not going to remember who. Who your kids were.

[C]

Yeah, it might be. I. I think sometimes. I sometimes think maybe it'd be better to translate as there won't be weddings in heaven, something to that effect. Weddings in the life of the age to come.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

And see what the point that he was making to the Sadducees is that the reason the Sadducees and this argument is a species of that, the reason the Sadducees thought the idea of the bodily resurrection was dumb was they. They heard it as, oh, sometime in the future we're all going to come back to life and live in the world the way it is now.

[B]

Right.

[A]

That's what the Sadducees were rejecting. And so the Sadducees come to Jesus with this argument against the resurrection, saying, okay, well, you know, lever at marriage, this one woman ends up getting married to, you know, one bride for seven brothers.

[C]

Thank you.

[A]

All eight of them are now alive again in the world.

[B]

Right? Right.

[A]

Whose wife is she gonna be? Who is it going to be? And in this context, we're talking about who is it going to be lawful for them to have sex with her?

[B]

Right.

[A]

And whose heirs will the children be? Because remember, that was the purpose of levirate marriage.

[C]

Yep.

[B]

Right.

[A]

You. You have a child with the brother, and that brother is considered to be the eldest brother's child and inherits.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And so they're saying, see here? Like, yeah, that doesn't work. And so Jesus is saying to them, like, are you dumb? Basically, like, that's what the. You neither understand, Right. The power of God nor.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Like, you don't get it.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Like, that's not what the resurrection is about.

[B]

Right.

[A]

That he compares the resurrected state to us being like the angels.

[C]

Yeah, that's in Luke chapter 20.

[A]

The resurrection is not just this life we have now. We come back to it and it goes on forever. And I'm, like, writing books and doing podcasts and drinking Pepsi Max and.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Just doing it forever. And the Pepsi Max is just always fresh now. You know? You know, this reminds.

[C]

This reminds. This reminds me, though, that in. In his commentary on this, although he's, as we know, Saint. Saint Theophylact of Okra is basically the. The Cliff Notes to Chrysostom, he. Not on this passage, but where the rich young ruler comes to Jesus and says, what must I do to inherit internal life? You know, he. The way he interprets that exchange is that the rich young ruler, what he wanted was the life that he had now forever. Right. So that's that same idea that you.

[A]

Were just talking about continuing to be rich.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. That the resurrection is basically just like this. But it. But you don't die and you don't get sick or whatever.

[B]

Right?

[C]

Yeah. And it's not.

[A]

This is a higher thing. And so in the resurrection, Christ is saying, we're not going to be worried about inheritance rights because why would you if nobody dies? Right. But also we're not going to be concerned about procreation. We're not going to be concerned about all. All that stuff is stuff we're concerned about in this world now, in this time, in this age.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And God has given us commandments governing that.

[B]

Right.

[A]

But the age to come is the age to come and things are going to be transformed. But it seems to be kind of preposterous to suggest that we're just all gonna have amnesia, you know, and, you know, you'll be there and your sons and daughters will be there and your wife will be there, but like, you won't remember each other and you'll just have the same kind of generic love for each other that you have for everybody.

[C]

Right.

[A]

And.

[B]

Right.

[A]

That. Yeah. And that, you know, that that may be that kind of idea of heaven and of the world to come.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Which get used interchangeably. It's probably seepage from the beatific vision, which is toxic sludge from Plato brain. Sort of like, you know that. That somehow all of those things were bad.

[B]

Right.

[A]

That. Here's an example of Plato brain related to this. Loving your wife more than you love everyone else is somehow wrong.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Is somehow selfish or prejudice and wrong.

[B]

Right.

[A]

If you have a wife. Bold statement I'm about to make. You should love your wife more than you love any other woman in the world. I don't think that's a bizarre statement.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Or shouldn't be. And you have a responsibility for love and support and things to your family, to your parish community that you don't have to everyone in the world. And trying to pretend that just, no, I love the whole world and everyone in it is number one, nonsense. Number two, kind of gross. But number three. But number three, it reduces love into something very banal, a good feeling.

[B]

Right.

[A]

The love I share with my wife is love that's made up of a lot of experiences, good and bad, that We've shared together and the memories of those experiences.

[B]

Right.

[A]

That's part of that love.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And again, to change that love into some kind of banal, if you wanted that for some reason, or if you thought morality required it for some Plato brained reason, would require us to just forget all that.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Just not. Not remember.

[C]

Yep, yep.

[A]

And then that defeats the point of the bodily resurrection because then I'm not me anymore. The me that rises from the dead. If the me that rises from the dead doesn't love my wife, it's not.

[B]

Me.

[A]

Doesn'T love my mother and my father, it's not me. Does it know who my sisters are? It's not me. It's generic human being number 1037-8955, who I guess if you believe the beatific vision, could go stare at the orb for eternity. But that's not Christian eschatology.

[C]

Surprised you would just give out your serial number like that, Father.

[A]

I know. Well, it's in a barcode on the back of my neck. So I mean anybody can go scanning anytime they want to.

[C]

Does that clarify things there for you?

[A]

Does that answer your question?

[C]

San Diego?

[D]

Yeah, that's that, that I was thinking it was something like that that Jesus was referring to. Just the very worldly view of marriage on. In terms of, you know, inheritance rights and arranged in marriage and everything like that. Is there something to what I earlier suggested though, that like being like the angels is like a very positive statement where the angels that surround God or like the different principalities and the virtues and everything, but there's sort of an interpenetrating nature to them. So like all the, it's like kind of what you kind of hear about in ethics, right. Where all the virtues are kind of wedded to other ones and you can't really practice a virtue in isolation. They kind of, they all kind of go together. Is there something kind of to that and like why and like that relating to marriage? Or is that a stretch?

[C]

I would say, I mean like. Yeah, metaphorically. Right. But like marriage as marriage is frankly in the ancient world, is about reproduction, number one. Not that it's only about that. But like for instance, when St. John of Damascus talking about angels, he says that they do not have marriage because they don't reproduce. Right. So he says that. But. But yes, in terms of love and all that, you know, like what you were just describing. Sure, sure. But I don't think that's what Jesus means because he went from saying, you know, they're not married and given in marriage, but are like the angels, you know, so, so it wouldn't, it would, it wouldn't make sense to say they're not married and given marriage, but they're actually like this other kind of marriage instead, you know? No, it's like the angels is that the life of the age to come is not like this life. It's quite different.

[B]

Right.

[A]

I think there's something to what you're saying in terms of the angels and the virtues.

[B]

Right.

[A]

But. So there are, there's more than one path to holiness.

[C]

Indeed.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Marriage is one of those.

[B]

Right.

[A]

But it's a path to holiness in, in this life, in this age.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And the angels are also holy.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And. And I think this is connected to why monastics are said to live the angelic life.

[B]

Right.

[A]

I don't think that's unrelated to the celibacy issue. I, I think those are connected.

[B]

Right.

[A]

They're pursuing a path to holiness that is more similar to the path, the. To angelic holiness than the path of marriage is. But those paths have the same destination.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Right.

[A]

If that makes sense.

[C]

Yeah. All right, thank you very much for calling, Alexander. We're going to go ahead and take another couple calls.

[A]

You know, that whole, like, loving everyone and everything equally. I was watching this. I won't name it because I don't remember the name. It had some pretentious title. I was watching this post apocalyptic TV show and it was actually the most wholesome apocalyptic TV show in history. Like, there was only one bad person who survived the apocalypse.

[C]

Oh, that's nice.

[A]

Yeah, like, everyone else was just nice and, like, friendly. But then I was like, this is kind of an interesting show. But then, like, right at the end of the show, like, the main character gives this, like, monologue and he says, and I quote, maybe if we learn to live with nature, she can teach us how to live with each other. And like, I threw up in my mouth a little bit and it was just like, you went and ruined the whole thing. Like, you ruined the whole show. Oh, man.

[C]

Okay, let's take another couple colors. The call board is actually lighting up. People are interested tonight. So we've got Timothy.

[A]

So.

[C]

So, Timothy, welcome to the Lord of Spirits podcast.

[D]

Hi, can you hear me?

[C]

We can hear you. What's going on, Timothy?

[D]

So, well, before I became Orthodox, after I left the Catholic faith and was just meandering through life, I moved into an apartment and everything was fine at first. And I started noticing knocks and box and things like that. And my landlord son lived there and had Lived there for years. And I, you know, we became friends because we're both kind of techie and gaming, we love gaming and tech. And I was just expressing to him the things I noticed and he said, oh yeah, there was a guy that died here and he was dead for days, maybe a week or more before they were, he was found. And I thought, okay. And he said, yeah, I noticed the same kind of things. It's just part of what goes on here. And I'm thinking, huh, you know, maybe this is proof of God, maybe this proof of a spiritual life. And again, keep in mind, this is like just me meandering between faiths and oh gosh, I was thinking if I could prove this in the spiritual world, then I got a reason to believe in God, right? So there's, there's the draw to me. And so I start calling out this thing and you know, if you exist, show me yourself, prove you exist. And I'm doing all of this like in ignorance of anything, just not knowing, just knowing that like I want proof of the afterlife. All this culminates in one night. I'm laying in bed and I had a window with a street light outside. So there was some slight light that came through and it was always kind of, I could always see the room. And I'm laying there and I get this chill and I look up and the entire room goes pitch black. Like there was no light, there was nothing coming through the window. There was nothing. And then this image, I saw it like inches from my face. And I don't know how to explain it except it was a demon. And I started praying harder than I've ever prayed. And it profoundly altered my view of what I was doing, right. And after I started praying I never, never ever again challenged it, never ever again asked it show itself. And I didn't see that again. But what I saw was the most insidious face I've ever seen in my life. I have never been more scared. And I do know that psychologically there is the fulfillment of self prophecies or whatever they call it where you know, you think something's going to happen and happens. And so I'm not sure if this was something that was like self made or something that actually saw. And that's the question I have. What do you think?

[C]

Well, I mean, I don't know what it's like to be you any more than I know what it's like to be a bat. I mean I would, I would say to me, right, like the point of experiences like that If God permits it, whether it's some kind of psychological experience or, you know, contact with a demonic spirit or whatever. The point of all of that is repentance. Like, the point is to come away from that. Either convert, you know, converting, returning to God, you know, increasing your faithfulness, whatever it might be. Right. Like, the question is, what you do with it? Not so much what was it? It's, what do I do with this? Right. I don't know, Father, what do you think?

[A]

Well, I mean, let's hone in on what the question is you're asking, right? Like, did this really happen?

[D]

Well, that's exactly right. Did it happen or was it in a man?

[A]

Well, of course it happened. It's an experience you really had.

[B]

Right? Yes.

[A]

So, I mean, when you say really happened, do you mean if you tried to touch the face, you. It would have been sol.

[B]

Right?

[A]

Like, I mean, what do you mean by really?

[D]

So it was pitch black, and then this image was there. It was. It wasn't lit. It was just visible on the. I still remember six inches from my face on the right side. I had to turn my head to see. Was almost like it was at the side of my bed.

[B]

Right.

[A]

But. So that's an experience you really had. But the question is, what does real mean? Like, it was material.

[D]

Understand? That's what this is.

[A]

So my point is, obviously, it's real. You really had that experience. It really happened to you.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And it's not the kind of. It's not the kind of thing that you could reach out and touch, right?

[D]

I didn't attempt to touch it.

[B]

Right.

[A]

But you see what I'm saying, right? Like, we're not. Say, this is a material thing, right. Like, it's not a question like, is the book really on the dining room table, right. Like, where you can go and check.

[D]

That's correct.

[A]

And the book is there or not. Right. So it's not that kind of issue.

[B]

Right.

[A]

When we're talking about any kind of spiritual experience, real means you really had the experience and it was meaningful to you. And it sounds like you definitely really had this experience, and it was definitely really meaningful to you.

[D]

Yeah, I became orthodox.

[A]

Yeah, there you go. But so it's like. It's like me asking, you know, did I really fall in love with my wife on the day I fell in love with my wife?

[B]

Right.

[A]

What does really mean in that case?

[B]

Right.

[A]

Like, I had the experience of falling in love with her. So, yes, I really did. Right?

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Yep. Yep. All right. Well, thank you very much for Calling Timothy. God bless you. All right, we're going to take one more call and then we're going to move on. So our, our next caller for this half is Daniel, who at least his phone says he's calling from Texas. So, Daniel, welcome to the Lord of Spirits podcast.

[D]

Hi, Father's Bless.

[C]

God bless you. Are you indeed in Texas?

[D]

I am indeed in Texas.

[A]

Texas is a big state.

[C]

It is big.

[D]

Yes. I'm in Plano. I go to St. Sava in Allen with the Photius.

[C]

Okay. Yes, we know Father Photius.

[A]

That clothes horse.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

So what's on your mind, Daniel?

[D]

I had kind of a monster manual question. I was re listening to those episodes and one kind of major monster group, at least in my head that was excluded, were ghouls. And I was thinking, like, these seem to have kind of a connection to like, you know, like the sort of werewolf idea, right, where they're, they're eating, you know, they're kind of cannibalistic at least if they're human and maybe to sort of the, I guess the Greek version of the vampire does some eating too, you know, more than drinking blood.

[C]

So I was wondering, like, is this.

[D]

Kind of, you know, another reflection of like what a nephilim is? Is this some kind of demon? Like, what's going on?

[C]

Yeah, I mean, ghoul. So ghoul. Actually, fun fact, ghoul is from Arabic, so it doesn't appear in English until 18th century. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, but I mean, so the concept within Arabic folklore, fairy tales, whatever is these are. Yeah, as you said, they're, they're, they hang out in graveyards, they eat human flesh. So you've got that kind of cannibalistic imagery. So I mean, yeah, it's participating in the same kind of continuum as, you know, you mentioned the Greek vampire, the vrikolakas. That's one you can try on at parties, you know, tell people. So have you heard of the vrikolakas? And then they'll have, they won't have heard of it unless they're Greek and then they'll probably know more about it than you. You know, it's the same kind of thing as that as, you know, giants. You know, there's actually, there's an old English word or which is where the word orc comes from. And that's again, it's sort of flesh eating or corpse eating idea in Latin. There's the orcus, which is actually where the old English Orkneys comes from. Again, sort of flesh eating. Although it's Fun. Like, the Latin orcas is even also, like, another name for the Hellmouth, but you can see how that would be related, you know?

[D]

Yeah.

[C]

So, yeah, it's. It's this kind of being. You know, it's. It's. In most of the literature, it's depicted in a very kind of fleshy way. Right. So, I mean, I would like. If I'm going to try to kind of. If I'm going to say, okay, this thing exists in the real world. What is. What actually is that. I would say that this is.

[B]

This.

[C]

These are demonized humans, you know, is the way that I would understand them.

[D]

Okay.

[C]

But again, you know, you're talking about, like, our image comes from literature for these things. So, you know, you don't necessarily take every single thing in the story in the most literal possible way, especially since these are not. These stories are not to be taken literally. That's not their. Their nature at all. So. Yeah. Does that make sense? Yeah. I don't know. Father, do you have any. Anything ghoulish you wanted to add?

[A]

I just. I just want to say that there's an important disambiguation here that George Romero style zombies are, in fact, ghouls. Not zombies.

[C]

Oh, excuse me.

[A]

The Serpent and the rainbow. That's zombies. The. Those are, in fact, ghouls and the Groovy Ghoulies are unrelated.

[C]

Thank you very much for calling, Daniel.

[D]

Thank you.

[C]

Say hi to Father Photius for us.

[D]

I will.

[B]

Great. Great.

[C]

All right.

[A]

So is the Groovy Ghoulies just totally forgotten media now?

[C]

It is for me. I don't think I ever even knew of it or heard of it.

[A]

So there's this show, the Groovy Ghoulies and Friends. The main bit was kind of an anthology. The main bit was the Groovy Ghoulies themselves, who are sort of your universal monsters.

[B]

Right.

[A]

But goofy and, like, hip for the late 80s and early 70s.

[C]

I just looked them up. I do recognize this imagery.

[A]

But they also. They had these sort of sub shows that were, like, bizarre renditions of, like, other recently canceled TV shows. Like an animated Gilligan's Planet. That was like the Gilligan's Eye cast.

[C]

That was. Yeah, I remember that was a. That was a thing a lot in 1970s cartoons.

[A]

Yes. And mush. That was like mash, but it was dogs.

[C]

Wow. Wow. And that. I'm just looking this up now. There were only 16 episodes of this show, and it ran from 1970-72.

[A]

You know who has them all on DVD.

[C]

I'll bet you do this guy.

[A]

Thanks to my wife, actually, she got them on. We also have the complete series of Land of the Lost, so be jealous.

[C]

Oh, there you go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nice, nice. So. All right, well, hey, let's talk about thoughts again. This is another one where we get a lot of like, you know, questions about, like. Wait, what? What?

[A]

So, as, as promised, in the first half, we're going to go a little deeper. We talked about how spirits, including demons, existed. The world of thoughts.

[B]

Right.

[A]

T H O U G H T S thank you. If you know, you know the. The what. Ed what. What that means.

[B]

Right.

[A]

So we're going to get a little more into what that means. And this is going to be pulling from some other old episodes that you may or may not have listened to and may or may not remember and try and pull some things together. And so what are we talking about when we're talking about the world of thoughts and thoughts in general?

[B]

Right.

[A]

As we've talked about, thoughts are not. We tend to, as contemporary people think about the mind as the brain, like the organ, the brain. And since it's in our skull, we think about it as sort of like a computer in a box.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And it sort of generates thoughts in there. And we have this. Most of us, not everyone. This is fascinating to me, but I've never actually met one of these people. But there are people who do not have an inner monologue. Yeah, but I mean, a lot of people, this isn't like a 1% thing. This is like a 20% thing of people. But, you know, we have this idea that we're sort of generating thoughts in this box. And. And so you'll see questions like, in Christian circles, can demons or can the devil, can they hear your thoughts or read your thoughts? And of course, within fiction, science fiction in particular, and superhero fiction, like telepathy, being able to read other people's thoughts and it's, you know, that means you can read the little balloon over their head, right? What they're thinking to themselves.

[B]

Right.

[C]

Are you telling me that Counselor Troi and Commander Riker couldn't actually talk to each other telepathically?

[A]

No, because she was only half Betazoid and so could only get thoughts and emotions she couldn't get. Like actual mind reading, like her mother Lomaxana could Man the voice of the computer. Turn in your fan club card, sir.

[C]

No, no, no. There's episodes like when, when, when she shows up for the first time on the Enterprise and she encounters Riker and this Is.

[A]

Well, that's their Imzadi thing.

[C]

Free beard. Like they. You hear the little I'm thinking, I'm thinking out loud sound like the way.

[A]

That got swept under the rug later.

[C]

Okay.

[A]

Like their relationship.

[C]

All right, all right. I'm just saying that's like, in the first episode, Encounter at Farpoint.

[A]

There's lots of weird things in the first episode, encountering Farpoint.

[C]

It is kind of a weird episode. You wouldn't look for the beard. All right, so.

[A]

But. So that's how we think about it, right?

[C]

Yes.

[A]

And this is a completely different paradigm than anyone in the ancient world had or that Christians had for most of Christian history about what thoughts are, what the mind is, how it works.

[B]

Right.

[A]

The fact that we think brain right off the bat.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Should tip you off that this isn't how they thought about thoughts.

[B]

That's.

[A]

And so if we think a little more. If we think a little. Phenomenologically. We've said this before on the show. We don't really have the experience of generating a thought in the sense that if you write a sentence, if I'm sitting in front of my computer and I type out a sentence, or if I'm sitting with a piece of paper and a pen. I know, Gen Alpha, you don't know what I'm talking about. And I'm going to write a sentence. I have to formulate the sentence. I think about what word I'm going to use next. We don't have that experience with a thought. A thought shows up in our head sort of fully formed.

[C]

Yeah. Which presents itself to us. We're going to disambiguate a little bit, everybody. Because I know this is where people get tripped up. They're like, no, wait, I've thought about things. Like, I came up with ideas.

[B]

Right. Right.

[A]

Now, we've had the experience of connecting thoughts together.

[B]

Right.

[A]

But thoughts and images sort of present themselves to our brain wholly formed. And sometimes we go, where did that come from?

[C]

Yeah. Yes.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Or, that's horrible. Why am I thinking that?

[B]

Right.

[A]

Or if you're like me, it's already come out of your mouth and you've said it before, you realize. And people are looking at you weird, or they're used to you, and they just go, father Stephen. So the way this was understood by ancient people and throughout Christian history, is that the noose. The mind is not referring to the brain, which is in a box of some kind, but the mind itself is sort of like a sensory organ.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Like your eyes or your ears.

[B]

Right.

[C]

Yeah, Things come in.

[B]

Right.

[A]

It's a way that things come in. In the same way that, you know, if my eyes are open and I'm looking past my microphone at my church office, I'm not choosing to see my wall calendar. My wall calendar is just there.

[B]

Right.

[A]

In my field of vision, you can look at it, but you're not focused on it.

[C]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

I can focus on my wall calendar or I can turn and focus on an icon on the wall, or I could turn and focus on the door.

[B]

Right.

[A]

But if I'm just generally looking straight forward, all of those things are in my field of vision. I'm not sure. Choosing to see them. Yeah, right. I don't have the experience of, like, constructing this image of the office.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Just I opened my eyes. That's what presents itself to me.

[B]

Okay.

[C]

Yep, yep.

[A]

And so thoughts are similar, but for the mind.

[B]

Right.

[A]

So the mind perceives a thought.

[B]

Right.

[A]

A thought comes in through the mind and we have then a point of attention that could be directed. We can direct our attention to a particular thought and dwell on it, connect it to other thoughts and ideas. We can try to expel a thought. We try to focus on something else because we don't like the thought that's presenting itself or the experience that's presenting itself. But the thoughts show up.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And this is why you'll see the Fathers referring to the noose as the eyes of the heart or the eyes of the soul.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Because that's the comparison that. It's like your eye.

[B]

Right.

[A]

But with thoughts. Now, as Father Andrew said, we need to disambiguate here between a thought and an idea. Okay. Between a thought and an idea. Because sometimes people, when they're trying to understand what we mean by this, will say, well, no, I have had the experience of generating a thought. And then what they describe to us is putting together an idea.

[B]

Right, right.

[A]

Using thoughts to construct an idea. Okay, so we're going to disambiguate what the difference is here between thoughts and ideas.

[C]

Yeah. And I would. I would maybe even also an add in thinking, you know, which is a sort of active engagement with the thought.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Thinking is what's involved in the formulation of ideas.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, right.

[A]

Of going from thought to idea.

[C]

Yeah. I mean, part of it is like this. Now we're using modern English words, but we're describing things that there are distinct ways of speaking about in the Church Fathers, for sure. But I don't know. Does ancient Greek philosophy make these kinds of distinctions as well?

[A]

Yes.

[C]

Okay, so yeah. Part of it is that we've lost. We've kind of conflated everything having to do with our minds into this one thing that we call thoughts or thinking. Right.

[A]

Because we have a fundamental, again, fundamentally different view of what the mind is and how it works.

[C]

Yeah, Right.

[A]

They're sort of processing data.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Or churning.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Or that it's us narrating our life to ourself. Or if you're one of those 80% with the inner monologue. But so thoughts just appear in our mind unbidden. We've all had this experience, right. Sometimes at very inopportune times. And it's not something that most of us, untrained as we are.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Can control.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Can stop a thought from coming into our head when we're sitting, right? You know, we think of something funny and laugh at an inappropriate time. We, you know, think of something sinful.

[C]

Speak for yourself, Father. I never do that.

[A]

Want to blot it out of our brain. Well, I always speak for myself, so I know that was the royal. We. We are not.

[C]

I was. I always use the editorial we.

[A]

Yeah. So that's thoughts, right? Thoughts just. Just sort of show up, right. Whereas ideas are formed.

[B]

Right?

[A]

Ideas are something we come up with. We put together an idea. We engage in the process of thinking about those thoughts that have come into our mind and put them together and construct ideas.

[B]

Right?

[A]

And those ideas that we construct are tools. We've talked about this on the show before, too. They're tools in that there's something we use to do something.

[B]

Right.

[A]

They are helpful to us in some way. The idea is.

[B]

Right.

[A]

But ideas are not spirits because they don't have agency. Ideas don't do things.

[B]

Right, Right.

[A]

Like the idea of. Well, right. Any one of my books, right? Religion of the Apostles.

[B]

Right?

[A]

Take one of my books. That is a set of ideas that I put together over time and published. If you destroyed every copy and I die and everyone who remembers reading it dies, those ideas will essentially cease to exist in the sense that that book will never come together. Exactly the same. And spare me the million chimpanzees with Typewriters. Right?

[C]

I mean, it used to be said that if you put a million chimpanzees with a million typewriters, they would eventually produce the works of William Shakespeare. But we have been running an experiment since the mid-1990s that's called the Internet, and we know that that is not true.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Because there's more than a million chimpanzees banging on keys that's Right, So the. Right, so it's gone.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Those ideas are gone.

[B]

Right.

[A]

But the thoughts, the impressions, the data, the things that I built into those ideas are not gone. And someone could construct something similar somewhere else.

[B]

Right.

[A]

But the idea does not sort of have its own existence.

[B]

Right.

[A]

The book does not have any existence beyond the memories of people who have read it and the copies of the book. There's no eternal existence of any of my books. Yeah, Sorry, Plato, ideas are not eternal.

[C]

Oh, it's our first. Sorry, Plato for the night.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And so ideas, they don't have agency, they can't do things.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Isms can't do things. People do things. People use ideas as tools to do those things.

[B]

Right.

[A]

But the ideas themselves don't do anything. This is, this is the basic problem with most atheist arguments against religion. Most atheist arguments for your average Internet atheist will argue that quote, unquote, religion does things.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Or quote, unquote, Christianity does things.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Religion has caused all the wars of the world. Really. A set of ideas. How did a set of ideas do that?

[B]

Right.

[A]

No, people did that.

[B]

Right.

[A]

But you could see, look at America before the Civil War, there were people using ideas about the Bible to support slavery and using ideas about the Bible to call for the abolition of slavery at the same time.

[C]

Indeed.

[A]

In basically the same culture. Right. So those ideas that they formed were tools.

[B]

Right.

[A]

The ideas couldn't do anything. And see, this is the thing. When atheists say religion does, blah, blah, blah, what they really mean is that God does it.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, but.

[A]

And they don't like it. And they don't like God and they're angry at him, but they don't want to admit that he exists. And so they have to say religion does it, even though it's preposterous to think that a set of disembodies, I disembodied ideas does things. So sorry, atheists, but. So ideas and thoughts are not the same. But so here's, here's an analogy because I know this is tricky and I know we're losing some people. So think of thoughts as sense impressions. So we're going to compare the news, the mind as a sensory organ to your eye, to vision, sensory organization.

[B]

Right.

[A]

So thoughts then are like the visual data that just floods in through your eyes when your eyes are open.

[B]

Right?

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

So there's just visual data.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

All of us have had the experience of looking out a window or looking across the room and seeing something and not knowing what it is.

[B]

Right.

[C]

That happens to me more and more as my eyes age.

[A]

Yeah, we're receiving visual data, but we're like, what's that?

[B]

Right.

[A]

Like, what's that over there on the floor?

[B]

Right.

[A]

Or what's that outside the window on the lawn?

[B]

Right.

[A]

And we try to frame and resolve it into what it is. We're getting accurate sensory data. The color, the shape, all of that is accurate. It's coming in our eyes, Right. But we don't know what it is.

[B]

Right.

[A]

So that's like thoughts, ideas are like when we resolve, when we focus in on it and say, oh, right, that's, you know, another dog toy that my dogs have torn up. That's why that's a misshapen blob. Now, right leg over there on the floor, right? That's an idea, right? Now that idea could be wrong. I might be wrong about what that is over there on the floor. And I could go and look at it and see, oh, am I right? Am I? Oh, it's not that. It's actually this other thing.

[B]

Right.

[A]

But the sensory data I was getting was accurate. So thoughts come into our head and then we resolve those thoughts into ideas.

[B]

Yeah, right.

[A]

And you. And the ideas we resolve them into are things that are useful for us. So, for example, when I've identified what I think the thing is. Oh, well, it's just that now I don't have to worry about it. I don't have to get up and go over there and pick it up. I know what it is, right? That's useful to me because I'm lazy.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Or I've lost something, I'm trying to find it, and then I see it, there it is.

[B]

Right.

[A]

But the idea is like another level of abstraction from reality that could be wrong. And that's because when we go from just a thought to an idea, when we go from just visual data to an image to resolving an image, our own subjectivity enters into it.

[B]

Right?

[A]

Our own subjectivity, our own past experiences help us recognize things when we see something similar.

[B]

Right.

[A]

If you see some object you've literally never seen before, right. You're going to be trying to come up with some idea of what it is. Whereas someone who has seen that object before will see it go, oh, that's a blank.

[B]

Right?

[A]

Again, that might be a false assumption. It might look like something they've seen before, but not be that same thing.

[B]

Right?

[A]

Because that's. Their subjectivity enters into it some completely new object might kind of resemble two different objects, and people familiar with either of them will both think that that's the object they're familiar with, and it's neither.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And so this is. This is the kind of thing that happens with ideas. So when we talk about ideas.

[C]

We.

[A]

Categorize them in different ways.

[B]

Right.

[A]

So one of them is distinguishing good ideas from bad ideas. If you used to watch Animaniacs, you may be familiar with good idea, bad idea.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Right.

[A]

But there we're talking about ideas in this very utilitarian way as tools.

[B]

Right.

[A]

So we're saying, you know, it was a good idea for me to stop on the way home and get some milk because we were out.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Meaning that worked out well. What I did worked out well. A bad idea would be it was a bad idea to stop and get milk on the way home because it turned out we had three gallons in the fridge that were, you know, not ready to expire.

[B]

Right.

[C]

See, in my house, there's six gallons in the fridge.

[A]

Okay. But, you know, do you, like, the kids have any?

[C]

Pretty much every week, Yeah. I apparently drink two gallons a week myself, as I discovered one time when I was home without everybody else.

[A]

That's not bad because my parents famously had to limit me to half a gallon a day as a kid.

[C]

There you go. Yeah, I'm doing.

[A]

I guess I was at three and a half a week, but every.

[C]

Yeah, there you go. Yeah.

[A]

But I was a growing boy, so.

[C]

Amen.

[A]

With a titanic bone structure. He's a.

[C]

Talk about the ship people.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

It's now sinking fast. But anyway, as I push 50.

[C]

So.

[A]

But we could also talk about good ideas and evil ideas.

[B]

Right.

[A]

So I drive across town. In my town, I see that there are a lot of homeless people in my town.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Based on what I saw.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And what I experienced, I come up with this idea. Someone needs to do something to help these people.

[B]

Right.

[A]

We need to build a homeless shelter. We need to help them find jobs.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Whatever. We need to help these people.

[B]

Right.

[A]

We'd say that's a good idea in that sense. Or I go and I have the same experience. I see them and I say, we need to round these people up and execute them all.

[C]

Bad idea.

[A]

That would be an evil idea. Not a bad idea. An evil idea.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Right.

[A]

This isn't a utilitarian thing.

[C]

Evil as in the fruits of the devil.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Yes. I, for one, follow the Judeo Christian ethic of thou shalt not murder.

[B]

But.

[A]

So, Right. So that is an evil idea. It might be a utilitarian sense. Easier to accomplish.

[B]

Right.

[A]

It might be easier to exterminate. All of the poor people than to lift them out of poverty by providing them with opportunity.

[B]

Right.

[A]

That doesn't make it good. The good option, because we understand morality. That's an evil thing to do, right? So there could be good and evil ideas, but that's because these ideas are constructed, right? So when it comes to thoughts, right. We can't control what thoughts enter our brain any more than when you open your eyes. You can control what you see in front of you.

[B]

Right?

[A]

Someone can hold up something obscene in front of you and you're going to see it whether you want to or not.

[B]

Right.

[A]

You could make the mistake of opening that message I send you and seeing the meme and being horrified.

[B]

Right?

[A]

And you can't unsee it now.

[B]

Right.

[A]

But you don't get to choose.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Once it's before your eyes, it's before your eyes.

[B]

Right.

[A]

The same kind of thing is true with thoughts. Thoughts will enter your head, right. That you didn't want to enter your head and you desperately want to get out of your head. That didn't come from you, that came in from outside, just like something you see. But what we can control is what thoughts we allow to form ideas and what ideas we allow those thoughts to form and then after that, what ideas we choose to act on. So we've used the metaphor before on the show and this is us trying to be more concrete about it. The metaphor on the show of thoughts being like seeds and you control which ones you allow to take root and grow. That taking root and grow is forming into ideas.

[B]

Yeah, right.

[A]

And what ideas, right. They are, they are allowed to form so thoughts can be accepted and rejected. You could have a thought and not allow it to become an idea. You can reject a thought.

[B]

Yeah, right.

[A]

By focusing on other things.

[C]

I think it's the Piuses who describes thoughts are like airplanes going overhead and you're an airport. You don't have to direct all of them to land.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, right.

[A]

And part of that is choosing which ones we focus on.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Right.

[A]

But then even the thoughts that come in and that we allow to form ideas, the thoughts that we then think about, that we dwell on, right? We have control of what kind of ideas those produce.

[B]

Right.

[A]

For example, you meet a person, right? From whatever impressions you get spiritually and materially, from what they say, from how they present themselves, how they talk, you get the impression this is a bad person.

[B]

Right.

[A]

This is not a good person. That's the impression you have. That's the thought that comes into your head.

[B]

Right.

[A]

You can Formulate that thought into different ideas, right? Ideas like, I should pray for this person.

[B]

Right?

[A]

I should try to help this person. I need to talk to this person about what they're doing because they don't realize how harmful it is, right? Or right. It could be. This is a bad person.

[B]

Right?

[A]

This person should be canceled. This person should be shunned. I should verbally abuse this person. I should cut this person off. I should go and warn everyone and talk about in detail what a bad person this is.

[B]

Right?

[A]

All those different ideas can come from the same thoughts, right? And the same impressions. And some of those are good, and some of those are bad, and some of those are evil. And we have control over that because at that point, we're at this sort of processing phase.

[B]

Right?

[A]

And so the. This is where the idea of.

[B]

Right.

[A]

A thought becomes a sinful thought when that thought leads you to sin.

[C]

Right? Right.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And we mean that metaphorically. The thought can't cause you to sin, right? But you could develop that thought into a sinful idea or not.

[B]

Right?

[A]

So a thought, right. That isn't. So let's take a thought.

[B]

Right?

[A]

You are in church.

[B]

Right?

[A]

You have a beautiful spiritual experience in liturgy that morning. And you. The thought that was a beautiful experience. I felt very close to God.

[B]

Right.

[A]

You can take that as good as that. Like, there doesn't seem to be anything bad or evil about that.

[B]

Right.

[A]

But if it. If you go and brag about it, it causes you to have pride. If it causes you to belittle other people, right? If the next week you don't have that experience and you sort of start to blame the noisy kid in the back row, and you go and you say, you know, mean things to the parents because, you know, they ruined your experience the next week.

[B]

Right?

[A]

All of those are a thought that was, you know, seemingly good that you have allowed to turn into an idea that is not right.

[C]

Yep.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And vice versa can be true.

[B]

Right.

[A]

There are people who have seen horrible things.

[B]

Right.

[A]

There are accounts of saints who have seen prostitutes, Right. And have wept for them and prayed for them and.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And a lot of men, when they see prostitutes, have different ideas that they form in their heads, right?

[C]

Yeah. Yeah.

[A]

So.

[B]

Right.

[A]

It's not the thoughts themselves, Right. It's what we do with them. And hopefully that's a little more concrete. And the place where we really work on this is prayer, because prayer is the place. One of the things prayer does for us, there are a lot of them, but one of the things prayer does for us is help us train our mind, train our news.

[B]

Right.

[A]

To make it more acute and more responsive.

[B]

Right.

[A]

To not be dulled.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Sometimes you've got to clean your ears out and get the wax out.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Sometimes you need glasses to correct your eyes.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Well, prayer sort of does this for our spiritual vision.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And so we've talked about in the show before how the Jesus prayer is referred to as the prayer of a single thought. Because you're training your brain to just focus on one thought to shut out the whole other cavalcade of thoughts. It's like a cacophony of noise and you're shutting it all out to just hear one voice. Right. Or one sound.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And ignore everything else. Women with lots of children probably already have this ability when it comes to hearing, but.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Learning how to focus our mind in that way.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And put out the other thoughts.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Because this is when people are trying. How many times have you tried to sit down and pray and you go through a whole page in a prayer book and you have no idea what you read.

[C]

Yeah. Or I mean, that even happens. Like, if you're reading a book, you know, like, wait, what did I just read? Yeah.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Because you're having all these other thoughts. And in prayer, it doesn't have to be like, evil thoughts.

[C]

Give me just any thought.

[A]

Yeah. Hey, did you lock your car doors?

[B]

Right.

[A]

I'm hungry off.

[C]

My coffee is getting cold.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. And just a cavalcade of. What was that noise? What was that other noise? And, you know, so that training to be able to focus on a single thought, the ultimate goal is what is called my father's wordless prayer.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Which I'm not claiming to have experienced. Father Andrew can speak for himself.

[C]

I will also not claim that you have experienced it.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

There we go.

[C]

Or that I have.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Where you're able to get past the thoughts and just sort of directly be in the presence of God. But the first step to even approaching anything like that is being able to focus on one thought.

[B]

Right?

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

To focus on Christ. And so.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

I mean, straining your noose.

[C]

One thing that like. Like this is if you've never had the experience of standing vigil, like, in church, which, you know, like, for hours and hours and hours and hours, especially, like, late at night, which is a monastic practice, you can sometimes find it in some parishes, you get to the point where you're so tired and so exhausted that if you then, you know, say to your mind, let's pray. Actually, you can almost achieve this just by Being exhausted, you know. Right. Which is like, well, sure enough, there's a reason why this practice exists. You know, like you get so tired that you're like, okay, let's pray. And you don't have the energy to do anything. Anything but do that. Yeah, yeah. So that's one way. I'm not saying everybody needs to do that, but it is a thing. I've experienced it once or twice in my life.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

And it's. And all these practices are aimed at teaching you to not think.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

As weird as that sounds, that's not saying, oh, don't question anything, do as we say.

[C]

No, no, it's just like learning how to turn it off and just.

[A]

Yes. And focus.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And be deliberate. And as you learn to focus, then you could be more deliberate about the kind of ideas you form in your mind.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And the kind of. And so this is one of the things people don't realize. And it's on purpose. The Enlightenment did this on purpose. Tried to strip away anything remotely religious from the philosophers of the past.

[B]

Right.

[A]

But actual Platonists, like at the academy, it wasn't just like, oh yeah, we read Plato's stuff and I agree with it.

[B]

Right.

[A]

There was a whole way of life associated with it.

[C]

Yeah. Yeah.

[A]

Same thing with Aristotle. And that included various meditation and prayer practices.

[C]

Yep.

[A]

That were aimed at.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Learning how to think deliberately and how to focus the mind.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Now obviously this wasn't being. But I mean, this is when they talk about the third eye in Eastern religions.

[B]

Right.

[A]

That's the noose. That's what they're talking about. They're trying to do this now. Trying to do this apart from Christ is dangerous.

[C]

Yeah. Not, not a good idea.

[A]

It's all get out. And I'm not saying you should use their practices to do this, but that's what they're aimed at.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Broad based understanding in the ancient world that, you know, if you're going to actually think. Right. That you got to train your mind to do it. And that's not just memorizing a bunch of logical fallacies.

[B]

Right.

[A]

So that you can accuse people of them online and get them wrong every time. It's a scare goal, you know, or taking advanced symbolic logic courses.

[C]

It's.

[A]

It's training your mind, your faculty to actually do it.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Reading logic textbooks is like reading about, like reading, you know, a sports playbook or reading a book about chess.

[B]

Right?

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Like you can learn a lot of things.

[C]

Yes. Right.

[A]

But, you know, and important things. But at some point you got to play chess or you got to play ball or you got it right, you got to do the thing, and you got to practice doing the thing to hone your ability to do the thing. And so this is part of what prayer does for us, is teach us how to think and how to process the things that we see in the world, both with our material senses and with the eyes of our heart.

[C]

All right. Well, our first half was about demons and their activity. Second half about thoughts. You might be thinking, what, what do these things have to do with each other? Well, just hang on because in the third half, believe it or not, we're going to bring it all together. So we're going to take our next break and we'll be right back.

[A]

Father Andrew Stephen Damick and father Stephen DeYoung will be back in a moment to take your calls on the next part of the Lord of Spirits. Give them a call at 855-237-2346. That's 855-AF-RADIO. The centuries after the Protestant Reformation brought about a radical reinterpretation of The Epistles of St. Paul, disconnected from any historical reality. But Paul operated during his entire life as a faithful Pharisee within the Roman Jewish world. In St. Paul the Pharisee, Jewish apostle to all nations, Father Stephen DeYoung surveys Paul's life and writings, interpreting them within the holy tradition of the Orthodox Church. This survey is followed by DeYoung's interpretive translation of St. Paul's Appeal Epistles, which deliberately avoids overly familiar terminology.

[C]

By using words and ideas grounded in.

[A]

1St century Judaism, DeYoung hopes to unsettle.

[C]

Commonly held notions and help the reader reassess St. Paul in his historical context.

[A]

Available now at store.ancient faith.com Again, that is store.ancient faith.com. we're back now with the Lord of Spirits with Father Andrew Stephen Damick and Father Stephen DeYoung. If you have a question, call now at 855-237-2346. That's 855-AF-RADIO.

[C]

Hey, welcome back, everybody. This episode of Lord of Spirits podcast, we're talking about demons and we're going to discuss demon possession here in the third half. But we have a. I'm gonna. We're gonna take two calls. We're gonna take two calls. So we're Orthodox.

[A]

We have to take three.

[C]

Okay, okay, we'll do three. We'll do three. Okay, that's it, everybody. Just three. So if you're in, you're in.

[A]

If you're not, we have to take 40. No.

[C]

How orthodox are we? Have we done, I don't think have we ever done 40 calls? Like one of our live call in shows? I don't think we've read 40.

[A]

I don't think so. We might have done 40 speak pipes.

[C]

I don't think. No, I don't think, like, yeah, no, no, I don't think so. In a single episode.

[B]

I don't know.

[C]

I don't think so. I'm the one who put them together, man.

[A]

We've been in the high 30s.

[C]

Anyway, okay, so first we're going to take James, who is calling from Oklahoma. I don't remember the rest of the line, but anyways, James, welcome to the Lord Spirits podcast. You've waited so patiently.

[A]

Is there a bright golden haze on the meadow?

[D]

Thanks for that Father's bless. I do have just a couple question about like Bashan because I've, you know, I'm familiar with the Bible, you know, kind of reading it, you know, before going to orthodoxy as a Protestant. And I know like it says in the Bible, like there's all kinds of symbology there, like Dan jumping out of Bastion, you know, like, you know, when it's like in the prophecy of the patriarchs to the quote to the 12 sons of Israel, there's also OG, you know, being the king of Bashan, you know. And recently, you know, I noticed that that's related in Syria to, you know, the Golan Heights area, which is, you know, which also has a lot of historical connotations. So I'm kind of wondering what the symbology of that is. And just a couple another question maybe in, you know, more related to the podcast. So in regards to like that question is like, I know it's like I'm kind of starting to think about icons kind of like at the same time they kind of maybe reflect something spiritually of ourselves. So like, you know, someone, you know, sometimes like we grow up with certain preconceptions. Like for example, you know, there might be like, for example, like a certain false masculinity which is incompatible like with gentleness, for example. So when you go to an icon, if you have trouble, you know, kissing the icon sometimes I'm wondering if that is that actually an evil spirit in that case. And just a third question, like, you know, just kind of like to kind of put in there going a little bit more mystically like the five wounds of Christ on the cross, is that, are those related to the five books of Moses? And is the four gospels, is that associated with the Tetra magnogram? Like yhwh, you know, in the Old Testament, that would be my questions.

[C]

Wow, you're really racking them up there. Okay, well, since you asked. Yeah, there you go. Since you asked three questions, I think we'll try to just give short answers. What is the importance of Bashan, Father Stephen? I mean, obviously this is a land of Og, but.

[A]

Right, yeah. So Bashan was the place of residence of a giant clan, of which Og was the chieftain or the king. Bashan was also later a center for BAAL worship. It's where Mount Hermon is.

[C]

Yep. Up there.

[A]

And Mount Hermon, remember, is, you know, Haram. Haram.

[B]

It's the.

[A]

Cursed mountain, essentially, because it's covered with pagan shrines. The ancient pagan shrines are still there on it.

[B]

Right.

[A]

You can go see them everywhere on it. And so it was a center for BAAL worship later. And so it was sort of the.

[B]

The.

[A]

The homeland of sort of spiritual evil in the north. It represents it. A lot of prophetic literature. My favorite reference to it, actually is the women of the northern kingdom of Israel being referred to as the sleek cows of Bashan.

[C]

Wow.

[A]

Which was related to bull Bale and.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

What he did to cows. So. Yeah, that's. But, yeah, so that's sort of what. What Bashon represents, which is in the modern day Golan Heights, which has been rubble for a long time.

[C]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, with regards to the second question, really quickly, like, is it a. An evil spirit? If you don't want to do a pious thing, like kissing an icon, I will just say, keep listening. Just keep listening to the rest of this half. And then you asked a question about numerological symbolism, like five wounds of Christ. What was it? I'm trying to remember now, the connections that you made. Yeah. Five wounds of Christ. With what was the five things that you were comparing it to?

[D]

The Pentateuch, like, with the five wounds of Christ.

[C]

Yeah. And then Tetragrammaton and the four Gospels. I mean, all of those things have been used by the Church fathers. They'll connect that stuff. But it's not like there's some kind of absolute, inherent, magical, formulaic numerology going on there. Like, these are images that are used in interpreting the Scriptures. Right. But it's not like there's some sort of secret code that's unlocked by saying, oh, here's a number four, and here's another number four. You know, that's.

[A]

And Christ had more than five wounds.

[C]

Yeah, right, exactly.

[A]

He was scourged on his back. He was.

[B]

Right.

[A]

I mean.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

But it's a teaching tool, right?

[C]

Exactly, exactly.

[A]

To make a connection.

[C]

All right, thank you very much for calling, James. There we go. Three for one. We're going to take two more calls. So our next is Ryan. So, Ryan, welcome to Lord of Spirits podcast. What's on your mind?

[D]

Not much. You kind of already covered one of my questions with the caller that had a question about nightmares.

[A]

Oh, I'm a big fan of your buffet, by the way.

[D]

I am as well.

[C]

Anyway, good call, Father Stephen. Good call.

[D]

I was gonna ask about stuff like parasomnias, like sleepwalking. People who will just sort of get up, or maybe not even get up, but they'll just do something in. Like, they're not awake.

[B]

Right.

[D]

But they're also definitely not sleeping normally, if there's any kind of spiritual side to that, because people will do some weird things when they're asleep.

[C]

Yeah, generally.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Yeah. Is there a spiritual side to sleepwalking and so forth? I mean, yes.

[A]

I hope not.

[C]

Oh, you hope not. I mean, we're. We're spiritual beings. Like, it's not.

[A]

Well, no, I know, I know.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

But in the sense that I don't think there's anything diabolical about it, per se.

[C]

No, no, no. Not ne. Yeah, yeah.

[A]

Right now there are people who do, like, violent things or sexually inappropriate things, and that guy like that, then you're in different territory.

[B]

Right?

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

But, you know, you're table. So I got. I gotta tell a couple stories now.

[C]

Okay.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Most of this was a result of my untreated sleep apnea that now that I have a CPAP machine, most of this has gone away. But even when I was a kid, I slept, walk all the time. I would, like, go to sleep in my bed and wake up on the couch. I would wake up wearing a hat. Just various things like that. This advanced to the point that my wife would hear. Like, if I was studying something in another language before I went to sleep, I would be, like, speaking Hebrew or Greek or something in my sleep, but you would think I was possessed. But the most famous one of these. And I don't know if I've mentioned this on the show before, but one night, in the middle of the night, I said loudly and clearly, out of the blue, and she heard it, I said, and that's how you kill William Faulkner.

[C]

Oh, you've told me this story.

[A]

Yes. And I don't. There was no context to it.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And I didn't remember whatever dream I was having, so I don't know if I had just, like, outlined a heist scheme and said, and that's how you kill William Faulkner? If I had just murdered William Faulkner and I was pointing at him and saying, that's how you kill William Faulkner. I don't know what the context was. I don't know if it was. It was killing his memory. If I had some problem with the Sound and the fury that.

[C]

I mean, he is dead.

[A]

Yes. If I was just doing a historical report.

[B]

Right.

[A]

I don't know. But. So, yeah, I had a lot of what might be called weird sleep behaviors and disturbances, but they were never violent or sexual.

[B]

Right.

[A]

In any way. And so I think that kind of stuff is basically just. It's a product of, like, my sleep apnea. I wasn't sleeping well. It was messing with my brain. So my brain wasn't shutting off my motor.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Reflexes while I was asleep. Now, if you get into that other territory.

[B]

Right.

[A]

The violent or sexual territory, then there needs. There's a different discussion right there.

[C]

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, thank you very much for calling, Ryan. All right. We're going to take one more call.

[A]

Sorry, Faulkner fans.

[C]

Yeah, I'm not a Faulkner fan. I'll just tell you that right now. Yeah. Yes. So we've got Tyler. Tyler will be our final call for the evening. So welcome to the Lord of Spirits podcast. Yeah, make it good.

[D]

Thank you, Fathers. Not long after my grandfather passed. Within a few weeks, I was awoken one night by a dark figure in my house. And in those days, I still suffered from severe Protestant mind and thought that it might have been some sort of demon or some sort of dark entity and asked Christ to protect me. And the dark figure sort of went away into the corner. But as I approached the church and I learned more about the intermittent state or the intermediate state, I. I sometimes wonder if that might have been him visiting me or. Or in some sense. I should mention that in those days, I would often listen to scripture on a tape at night. And my question is, is there a way that we can differentiate between dark entities as demonic or demonized, fully demonized people, or our past loved ones who may revisit us or may revisit places they've been in their life?

[C]

Yeah. I mean, St. John Chrysostom. Isn't this right, Father? He has a homily where he talks about what to.

[A]

Do you encounter the spirit of a dead loved one.

[C]

Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

[A]

And I mean, as a common experience that people have.

[C]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, as I recall, correct me if I get any of this wrong. What he basically says is it's supposed to, you know, don't just simply accept it and, you know, whatever, but. But it's. It's supposed to lead you to repentance, no matter what it is that you experience.

[A]

Well, also you. You treat those experiences based on the fruit thereof.

[C]

Right? Right. What is the outcome?

[A]

So if the effect that that experiences spirits has on your life is to bring you to repentance or to bring you joy or consolation, to bring you closer to God, then by all means, right, embrace. Embrace that experience as a good and positive thing. Don't become proud about it or arrogant, but spiritually arrogant, but accept it as a good thing. If what that produces in you is fear or unsettling or something else that has the opposite effect that disturbs your Christian life, then reject it as demonic.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Because if God has some message he wants to get to you, he could get it to you loud and clear.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And unambiguously.

[C]

Yeah. So no hinting required.

[A]

It's not that. Rejecting that. Rejecting a potentially positive experience is not going to cheat you out of anything. Right. God will. Will clarify it for you. Whereas, you know, too quickly embracing an experience that may have negative elements can cause problems down the line.

[C]

Yeah.

[D]

Yeah, I see. Thank you.

[C]

Thank you very much for calling, Tyler. All right. Okay, so we're talking about demonic possession now. Thank you very much, everybody who called. We're gonna just roll on through the rest of this episode and we'll get to you on a.

[A]

You don't want to open the lines for people who may be demon possessed. We're not going to go full Art Bell on this.

[C]

No, no, no. I mean, people have been waiting around for what we're about to discuss, so.

[A]

They just announced that they're making an Art Bell biopic.

[C]

Are you serious?

[A]

Starring Paul Giamatti.

[C]

Oh, wow. Maybe we should do like an MST3K version of that. That would be fun.

[A]

But yes, yes. Right, so here we go. Demonic possession. What do demons do?

[B]

Right.

[A]

As usual, we get to our actual topic in the third half. So the first place where we really see. I mean, obviously, right, the serpent in the garden is demonic activity. We talked about, you know, the falls. We've talked about that in another episode that obviously involves things we would call demons. But the kind of demonic activity that we're talking about now. Right, because where we're going with this is what are demons doing today? Not just a historical survey or a biblical survey, but what are they doing.

[C]

Today here in the 21st century? And.

[A]

But how we understand that does have its roots in Scripture. Right. So the first place we go is to King Saul in First Samuel, or First Kingdoms, if you're using that orthodox study Bible where we see Saul after his sin is this unclean spirit is sent by God to torment and trouble him.

[C]

Yeah. When it says that the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit left him.

[B]

Right, yeah.

[A]

And God sends this unclean spirit instead to trouble him. Now, this is not this. A lot of people have a real problem just with what I said already.

[B]

Right.

[A]

God sending an unclean spirit. God sending a demon on Saul. And part of that is because I think people read it as a punishment, like, oh, he was bad. So God, you know, if I do. If I sin, if I do something bad, God's gonna send a demon to torment me.

[C]

No, it's. It's actually. Actually it's a kind of tough love.

[A]

Yes. So the idea was that. That the torment of this unclean spirit would drive him to repentance.

[C]

Right. Because he was kind of too comfortable before, so help him. And so how much he needs God, frankly.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

And.

[A]

And so this spirit comes to torment him. The. This is related to what St. Paul says when he's talking about excommunicating someone as sort of the final step of church discipline to call them. He refers to that as handing them over to Satan.

[B]

Yeah, Right.

[A]

Like this is the idea. The idea is. Well, at a certain point, you cut them off of things in the hope that they will repent and come back once they see how bad it is to be sort of on the outside.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And so Saul's put on the outside, but rather than that leading him to repentance leads him to anger, rage, murderous rage against David, resentment, everything but repentance.

[B]

Right.

[A]

When we get to the Book of Tobit, we get to a case that of demonic activity that's starting to look more like what we see in the New Testament. So Tobit, probably there are a lot of folks who are listeners who are Protestant friends or who are from a Protestant background who may not have read Tobit.

[C]

You should read it, by the way, even if you, like, don't regard it as scripture. It's a great story.

[A]

Yeah. I mean, it's at least a great piece of Second Temple literature.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Even if you object to full canonicity or what have you.

[B]

But.

[A]

So in Tobit. So because people haven't read it, we're going to frame this a little more. So in Tobit, there's this problem presented where Tobit son is going to marry this Woman, Sarah. Problem being there's this demon, Asmodeus.

[C]

Yeah. She's been engaged a bunch of times before.

[A]

Yeah. And so, as we've talked about in the marriage episode, marriage proper was basically the consummation of the marriage. That's when you were married. That's when you moved from betrothed to Mary. So it was consummated. And every time one of these seven men had tried to come in and consummate the marriage, Asmodeus had killed them.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

It's a little traumatic.

[C]

I mean, this is kind of a scary story in some ways.

[A]

Yes. And so, you know, Tobit obviously does not want his son to be the next one, but Tobit and his son are on this journey with the Archangel Raphael accompanying them, and the Archangel Raphael helps them out and gives them something to do.

[C]

Yep.

[A]

Which will.

[B]

There.

[A]

There are a couple of problems. One problem is that Tobin has been struck blind. The other problem is dealing with Asmodeus. And St. Raphael tells them to catch a certain fish and prepare it in a certain way, do certain things with it, burn certain parts of it as an offering, and then that will take care of the blindness issue and take care of Asmodeus. A lot of people have problems with this part because they're like, what is this weird? Why is he, you know, this archangel giving voodoo recipe?

[B]

Right.

[A]

To do this? And, you know, so this is one of those things. So certain of our Protestant friends who are really opposed to seeing a book like Tobit as being part of the Old Testament, they will do this thing where they go through it and they try to find everything that they think is ridiculous. So, like this. Like this fish thing and say, oh, look, that's ridiculous. This can't be part of the Bible.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

But I could go on YouTube right now and find some atheist saying, oh, look, Balaam's donkey talks to him. That's ridiculous.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Right?

[A]

An axe head floating. That's ridiculous.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Ezekiel running around the city naked. Ezekiel seeing all this weird stuff in the sky. Clearly he's taking lsd.

[B]

Right.

[A]

They say all the same stuff right now, our Protestant friends who make the argument about Tobit will be quick to rush to defend the scriptures they view as canonical against those accusations when an atheist makes them. But then they make the exact same accusations on the same basis.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Using the same standard of believability about books that they think should be excluded. That's not weighing with even scales.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Let's think about this fish thing for a minute. Do not the prophets in The Old Testament and angels who come to visit people in the New Testament, give them signs with material things or assign them things to do. Like why did Naaman the leper have to go dip himself in the Jordan seven times to be healed?

[C]

Right.

[B]

Right.

[A]

What's, what's with Gideon's fleece?

[B]

Right.

[A]

There's, there's all kinds of signs and stuff and these with material things that happen all through the Old Testament scriptures. This isn't really different.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

You could, if you want to argue to get rid of Tobit, you can argue on a different basis. But just saying, oh, that's, this is the same kind of stuff you find in the canonical scriptures.

[B]

Right?

[A]

So there's not really a difference there. Also, by the way, Tobit was originally written in Hebrew. It was not originally written in Greek. We know, because we have Hebrew and Aramaic fragments of it in the Dead Sea Scrolls from Kumra. So that's just a fact.

[B]

Right?

[A]

It was translated into Greek. But anyway, I digress slightly. So Tobit does the stuff he's supposed to do with the fish he could see, right. And his son Zalebar Sarah, because Asmodeus gets banished when he gets sort of exorcised, he gets sent back to Egypt and Saint Raphael imprisons him in Egypt. I know these seem like random details, okay. But we're going to get, we're going to do a little, little mini deep dive here, a shallow dive, a mid range dive right here about Asmodeus. And some of these little details in Tobit are going to be important or are going to connect to other things. So Asmodeus, this is one that we haven't talked about before. We've had some episodes where we talked about different names for the devil, right. And devil figures in Second Temple literature and in the Bible, like Belial and Azazel and Satan and the devil and Beelzebub. Right? We've gone through a bunch of those. We did run on the Antichrist, but we haven't talked about Asmodeus. So this is, this is some different stuff.

[C]

So Asmodeus, he does show up in the Lord of Spirits book, everybody.

[A]

There you go.

[C]

Put that out there. Yes.

[A]

So Asmodeus, the name Asmodeus is not just the name of a French board game company. It's a, it's a transliteration of Persian. Pretty much everyone agrees, right? 100% of scholars never agree about anything. There's always a minority report, right? There's always someone trying to overturn the consensus. But Just about everybody agrees that it is a transliteration of Aishmadeva in Persian becomes Asmodeus in Greek, which literally means in Persian, wrath demon.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Demon of wrath. And so the idea here is that this demon and this demon coming upon someone is a manifestation of God's wrath. So something sinful has happened, this demon manifests itself.

[B]

Right.

[A]

So this is kind of similar to what's going on with King Saul.

[B]

Right?

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

But then Asmodeus, even though he just shows up here at Tobit, has a long afterlife. Tobit is not part of the Hebrew Canada of the Old Testament, but it has a long afterlife in Judaism and through Judaism and Islam. In Islam, Asmodeus is a devil figure and is the king of the demons in certain Islamic literature. But this comes by way of the Talmud. And so there are these various references to Asmodeus sort of littered around in the Talmud that reflect sort of these different earlier traditions, these bits and pieces. And some of these are also reflected in, of all people, St. Gregory the Dialogist, or St. Gregory the Great, the Bishop of Rome at the end of the 6th century, reflects some of these traditions. So in the Talmud, Asmodeus is connected with Solomon's wives in a couple of different ways, through a couple of different traditions. One of those traditions, he impersonates Solomon potentially to sleep with his wives. And, you know, there are other things going on with Solomon. We'll get a little more into that here in a minute. And he's also presented at one point as being married to Lilith. So you roll on back to a previous Halloween episode about LILITH Also.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

St. Gregory the geologist, Bishop of Rome, end of the sixth century, talks about Asmodeus and says that he is a fallen throne, which is the third rank seraphim, cherubim and then thrones, meaning he was a demon connected with a place or a nation, with ruling a place or a nation. And then when you get into Medieval Judaism, you find a more developed bit of traditional that Asmodeus is actually.

[B]

The.

[A]

Disembodied spirit of David's Nephilim.

[B]

Right.

[C]

Which we should emphasize. This is long, long passage.

[A]

This is a medieval Jewish tradition.

[C]

Canonist. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

So this is not. This part is not St. Gregory.

[B]

Okay.

[C]

Yeah. This is the. Wow. There's some really interesting fairy tales from the Middle Ages.

[A]

Well, no, no. So. Well, okay, I know there are bits of. A whole bunch of bits of pieces of tradition here, right?

[C]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I shouldn't. More like legend, I think.

[A]

Legend Right. And. And I think you can pick up these pieces and you get an idea, you get a shape of something going on in the background here. Okay, so in that tradition, David slept with a Grot, the daughter of Milat.

[C]

Which is a great name.

[A]

You do not want to give your daughter this name.

[C]

Honey, I was thinking about Agrat.

[A]

Look, Melot.

[C]

No way. No, you can't.

[A]

She's a demon who was considered to be the mate, in some sense, of Samael.

[C]

Yeah. Is that the angel of death there? Samael?

[A]

Yes. Samael is one of the seven archangels who fell in a bunch of traditions, including St. Gregory. The theologist mentioned Samael. So we get the picture that St. Gregory at least was conversant in some of these traditions, and he's living at the end of the 6th century, so he's verging into the medieval period.

[C]

Yeah. So there's this idea that David is participating in this kind of pagan sect.

[A]

Right. Because a was a spirit associated with shrine prostitution.

[C]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

So the idea here of this tradition is that David engaged with a shrine prostitute of one of the foreign deities at some point in Islam and had a son.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

This son is identified by these Jewish traditions as Hadad the Edomite, who appears in 1st Kings 11:14 or 3rd Kingdoms. 11:14. So Hadad the Edomite in 1st Kings is this guy who shows up who. He's called Hadad the Edomite because he was a member of the Edomite royal family who escaped when Joab, David's general, wiped out the Edomite royal family. He escaped to where? Egypt.

[C]

Okay.

[A]

He hid out in Egypt.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And then he comes back to Edom when he thinks the coast is clear, to try to take that throne, and also tries to take the throne of Israel, becomes a rival to Solomon, David's son.

[C]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

So the idea in this tradition is that Hadad the Edomite is David's illegitimate son.

[C]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

Through engagement, this temple prostitution who came out of Egypt, he dies.

[B]

Right. So.

[A]

So some version of the Nephilim ritual. Right. This figureheaded, the Edomite dies. His spirit is then known as Asmodeus.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Who Tobit sends back to who? Well, who Tobit with Saint Raphael, send back to Egypt and imprison there. So with this background, in terms of the story that Tobit is telling.

[B]

Right.

[A]

There's a story Tobit is telling in the third century B.C. the idea is that Sarah, this woman, didn't just get random, just randomly get picked by a demon to kill all her boyfriends.

[B]

Right.

[A]

That wasn't what's going on here, that there was some sinful thing involving shrine prostitution that had gone on.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

That had brought this demon to the proximity of her and her family.

[C]

Yeah. Not necessarily that she was doing.

[B]

Right.

[C]

Yeah. Yeah. Certainly not.

[A]

He's presented as a victim of it.

[C]

Yeah, a victim, yeah.

[B]

Right.

[A]

But this is the way a lot of demonic activity works, frankly, is that there's this ancestral element to it of parents and children and parents doing things and then children suffering consequences of it.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And so what's happening is that Tobit and his son Tobias and St. Raphael sort of deliver her from this. Whatever this darkness was that brought this demon around her family.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And the connection of the demon with Egypt, this had had. The Edomite stuff, may be in the background of Tobit, but it's not in the book of Tobit. Right. But I think that Egypt connection is not random. May show the antiquity of sort of some of those. Those traditions. So there's that. See, I think that bit right there, that was worth the price of admission tonight alone.

[C]

There you go.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Like.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Are you not entertained? Come on. So moving from Old Testament, of course, the place where we most see exorcisms in the Bible is in the Synoptic Gospels and Acts. There are no exorcisms in the Gospel of John, but in the Synoptic Gospels, in Acts, there are a lot of them. We've talked before on the show about the connection between Jesus as the Messiah and this because of particular Psalms of David that were used in the first century, we know from Qumran and other places were used for exorcisms. So David was this figure associated with exorcism. Son of David, the Messiah. Similarly. And so part of the reason why the Synoptic Gospels are presenting Jesus performing exorcisms is connected to his messianic identity as the Son of David. But also we see that this is demonstrated and described as an authority over unclean spirits, an authority over demons that Jesus possesses and which he then is able to give to his disciples and apostles.

[C]

Yeah, Yep, yep. You have authority over scorpions and serpents and etc.

[A]

Both the 12 of the 70 are sent out.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And then into the Book of Acts, Right. They continue doing these things. And we see elements of. In the interactions between the demons and Christ, we see elements, both of them, recognizing his identity, who he is, and the element of, you know, are you here to trouble us before the time?

[B]

Right.

[A]

That there is this period of. There's this end.

[B]

Right.

[A]

The devil knows his Time is short. There's this end to the period of their activity, at which point they will be punished and imprisoned. But most importantly, both in the case of Christ and his disciples and apostles, the authority manifests itself as they cast out demons with an authoritative command.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And the demons have to obey it because it's Jesus authority. It's Christ's authority.

[B]

Right.

[A]

That's sort of the important element there. And we see there is a distinction, though. Again, this is something which Jesus, his divine identity inherently possesses.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And is able to give the disciples, but the disciples receive it from Jesus. That kind of is made clear with the whole episode in the book of Acts with the seven sons of Sceva who are going around trying to cast out demons in the name of Jesus, who Paul preaches.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

Trying to use it as like, magic words, as like a formula.

[C]

Right.

[A]

And the demon possessed people say, well, Jesus we know, and Paul we've heard of, you know, but who are you? And then proceed to whoop them, to bludgeon them precipitously about the head and shoulders. But so in that, right, you notice they say, jesus we know.

[B]

Right.

[A]

They know who he is.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And they've heard of Paul being finite beings.

[B]

Right.

[A]

They haven't personally met him, but they know who that is.

[B]

Right?

[A]

Yeah, but that's not how it works.

[B]

Right.

[A]

This is an authority that Christ possesses that he's able to delegate and give to others, but it's not that his name is magic for this.

[B]

Right?

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

So what does it mean to be possessed by a demon? We use that term all the time.

[C]

Yeah. I think people have this idea, like, again, from movies, that demon possession is. I don't know, There's a lot of different things that gets described.

[A]

Pea soup.

[B]

That's what it's about.

[C]

Yeah. Or, you know, you hear head rotating all the way around, or you hear voices talking to you, or, you know, like your body gets animated by this other force. Yeah. I mean, there's a whole bunch of different weird. Or, you know, you're talking with a weird voice. Right. Like, these are all things, I think.

[A]

That people Definitely talking with a weird, creepy voice.

[C]

Oh, yeah, totally. I mean, without that, you know, it's not. Yeah, yeah. What did I pay my 10 bucks for this movie for anyway, if I get that?

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[C]

So is there a difference between demon possession and, like, demonic influence?

[A]

Yes.

[C]

Is that this. Yeah, yeah.

[B]

Right.

[A]

To be possessed by a demon. We're talking about us. We're talking about when spirits are controlling people.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

We're Talking about a removal of agency from the person so that the person is just acting on demonic impulses.

[C]

Yeah. It's not, it's not just like being tempted, you know? Yeah. Not just thoughts. It's not just even like feeling afflicted or whatever. It's really like handing over, you know, like, like, like a demon is using your body. Like a.

[A]

Like a mech from the person is out of control.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

And just acting based on.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And it's. The comparison is. Right. If. If you know, a person cannot voluntarily. You can't hold your breath until you die.

[C]

Right.

[A]

You literally can't.

[B]

Right, right.

[A]

And if you get even remotely close, your body itself goes into this state of desperation where you will gasp for air right beyond your control.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Or if a person is legitimately starving, Right. Like legitimately on the verge of starving to death, and you put food in front of them, they will eat that food.

[B]

Right, Right.

[A]

Whatever it is.

[B]

Right.

[A]

There's. There's not a.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And so that kind of loss of control is the loss of spiritual loss of control we're talking about with demonic possession.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Where it's just acting on these demonic impulses immediately. There's no, like thought and consideration.

[B]

Right.

[A]

It's just an immediate action.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Another way of thinking about it might be, you know, addiction.

[B]

Right. At.

[A]

At a certain point you're choosing to drink or to use it. To take a drink or to use a drug. At a certain point, though, down the road of that, you're not choosing anymore.

[C]

Yeah. It overrides your will on, you know, little by little, like he erodes your will initially, but.

[A]

But yeah, it puts you into that state of physical desperation.

[B]

Right.

[A]

That's what we're talking about.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Is that happening with a demonic spirit in the driver's seat?

[B]

Right, right.

[A]

And that, of course, represents a reduction of humanity.

[C]

Yeah. It's a subhuman state.

[A]

That's why when we see demon possessed people like in the synoptic gospels, they're like living among the tombs, Right. Running around naked.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Living like animals.

[B]

Right.

[A]

In this. In this subhuman state. And this is what. When we're talking about fallen humanity, this is fallen humanity.

[B]

Right.

[A]

The imaging of God, the ability to image God has been sort of given up.

[C]

Yeah. And there's a continuum of this. But with demonic possession, we're talking about a really extreme pushed way, way down the continuum.

[A]

But that is not the most extreme state. No, there is a worse.

[C]

Yes, it could be worse.

[A]

There is a worse state.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Because the demon Possessed person needs to be delivered from the demon.

[C]

Yes.

[A]

They're in the same way that.

[B]

Right.

[A]

The person in any of those other states of desperation needs to have their affliction removed.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Like they need to be fed or they need air or they need to break the addiction.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Same kind of thing. They need to be delivered from the evil spirit. The step worse than that is where a person is still fully in control and has their will functioning, but voluntarily agrees with the demons.

[C]

Yeah, you're synergizing with demon.

[A]

They align their will with these demonic spirits. And what they want to do, they're not that they're out of control and acting on the demons, prompting. It's. They're fully on board.

[C]

Yeah. They're not enslaved, they're partners.

[A]

And this is what we're talking about where we're talking about giants when we're talking about Nephilim.

[C]

Yeah. Which.

[A]

This is what we're talking about.

[C]

Emphasized that as you said earlier, I think, in the episode.

[B]

But.

[C]

And as we said before, you know, these, these, these giants, Nephilim, these, These demonized people are not truly the kind of product of a particular ritual or whatever. Yes. That ritual can be involved in that person's life and can be kind of the start of this relationship that they have with the human demon. But you can get there in other ways. It's really just about aligning your will with the demonic will.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And if Sarah in Tobit had decided to agree with the demon, didn't look at it as an affliction.

[B]

Yeah, right.

[A]

Had become demonic herself, that's what we would be talking about. But she didn't. Right. It was an affliction. It was something she need to be delivered from and saved from.

[C]

Right, right, right. And you know, in orthodox Christianity, we talk about, like, the path of salvation is the path of. Of synergy with God. Like, you energize with God's energy, your will aligns with God's will. You do, you know, you do his.

[A]

Works, whatever your activity. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[C]

But. But there is an opposite approach. You can synergize with demons. And I've had people, I, I said this some. I can't remember where it was. Somewhere on social media, I said that. And someone's like, no, synergy is a word that only applies to what we do with God. And you know, when we were talking about this earlier, Father, you pointed out to me actually, actually in second Thessalonians 2.

[A]

9, actually.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. In second Thessalonians 2. Nine, talk about the Antichrist the man of lawlessness. St. Paul says that this man of lawlessness, it says, whose coming is after the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders. And that phrase, after the working of Satan is kat energian to Satana. So according to the energies of Satan, of the Satan. So, yeah, that's synergy with the Satan right there.

[B]

Right?

[C]

I mean.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[C]

And it's not. It's not a magical thing. Like, it's just.

[A]

Your will is what makes him the Antichrist.

[C]

Right.

[A]

Your will is participating in the energies of the devil. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so there is this sort of spectrum. And on. On one end of the spectrum, you have temptation, Right. Thoughts coming into our heads.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Demons putting thoughts into our heads.

[C]

Everybody experiences this.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And then you have. The next step is sort of demonic torment, like what we see with Saul.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Where these thoughts we don't handle and deal with correctly.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And so they start generating sin in us, like anger.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And spiraling. Yeah. And start spiraling. Then the next step past that is possession. And then the final step of the other extreme from temptation is participation.

[C]

Yeah, that's the. That's the Nephilim level.

[A]

Yeah. Giant land.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And there are not a lot of these people, but there are these people.

[C]

Yeah. We could call them ghouls to refer to.

[A]

Well, I mean, they don't even have to be lit.

[C]

Well, they don't yet.

[A]

I was about to say, I've only ever met one in my life. It was in a prison, and he had engaged in an act of cannibalism. So there you go. I was about to say they aren't necessarily cannibals, but there you go. Yeah, but. So, yeah, there are these people, Right. They're very rare, thank God.

[B]

Right.

[A]

But that. That spectrum we just talked about from temptation on the one end to participation really is a question of one way of looking at it, is how much humanity, how much imaging God is left. So you could be a very holy person and face temptation, of course, the Lord himself. That's why it's at the one. That's why it's at the one extreme.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Participation.

[B]

Right.

[A]

When you're at that level, when you're like the Antichrist, a giant level, you have, as St. John Chrysostom says, essentially become a demon on Earth. You've become one yourself, essentially.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

You don't. It's not that you change into another nature. He says this. It's not that you change natures. It says that your. Your energy, your Functioning becomes just like theirs.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. And so at that point, your humanity is all but gone.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And that's why one of the ways that the internal condemnation that such a person might face at the judgment seat of Christ is referred to in the orthodox church by some fathers as sort of a loss of humanity. That whatever little bit is left before the judgment, right. That's sort of the consequence at the judgment is that whatever little humanity is left is lost. But anyone at any point in the spectrum, and yes, I'm including those people in that participation level, in that giant level, in that ghouls, any of them, as long as they're alive, can find repentance through the power of God.

[C]

Yes. There's no one who in this life is hopeless.

[B]

Right.

[A]

I mean, and we see people up to the giant level in the scriptures being delivered, including, you know, legion being possessed by, you know.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Hundreds of demons being delivered from that.

[C]

Yep.

[B]

Right.

[A]

So that's a, that's a thing. So this gets into then. So how is how exorcism works, Right.

[C]

We had a couple questions in the chat asking about exorcism.

[A]

So here we go, everybody and how we understand exorcism. Right, but it's based on what we just said, Right? So exorcism is going to be a way, way of dealing with.

[B]

Right.

[A]

The demonic influence on a person anywhere across that spectrum, you could describe it as exorcism.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

But so what we just said about that spectrum, then it's going to color how we see exorcism. So we do exorcism at baptisms famously, right?

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Getting of the orthodox baptismal service is.

[C]

An exorcism which people will ask, like, wait, are you saying the baby is demon possessed or whoever is coming to baptism is demon possessed?

[A]

No, but they're at least on the temptation level of the spectrum.

[C]

Right. I mean, they're living in a world where they're being. Where demons are attacking them like we all are.

[B]

Right.

[A]

If you're anywhere on that spectrum, Right. There's demonic activity around you.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And the exorcism is dealing with that.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Now that included in the, in the ancient church, you know, adults who were full on demon possessed.

[C]

Absolutely. Yes.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Or who had been.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And were now maybe tormented.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Their pagan days, they had been possessed. And now in there, after their years of repentance to come into the church, they're more at the tormented stage. But we're still dealing with that, with this exorcism right before baptism. And we talked Already a little bit about cleansing and doing an exorcism on a place.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Or doing exorcism prayers with people. The important thing is that the exorcism is not dealing with some kind of psychological state.

[C]

Yeah. It's not on the part of the person. Feel better now? You might feel better, but that's not the point.

[A]

That's a consequence. That's the substance of it.

[C]

That's not what's going on.

[B]

Yeah, right.

[C]

I mean, I hope you feel better.

[A]

You get these people, Bob Larson, who go around taking money from benighted people who want to come and offer them, you know, who have, you know, the demon of overeating or the demon of self esteem, for him to, like, smack him in the head and tell them it's cast out of them.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

That's a grift. That's got nothing to do with actual exorcism. That's got nothing to do with any of this.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

It's not at all we're talking about. What we're talking about is exorcism is a way of dealing with sin and its consequences.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And one of the consequences of sin is enslavement to sin and enslavement to the demonic powers.

[B]

Right.

[A]

That's one of the consequences. And so that slavery needs to be broken, and the person who has the authority to do it is Christ. And the exorcism ritual, whether it's in baptism, whether it's outside of baptism, whether it's the exorcism place, it's about breaking that connection.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Breaking that chain that's been forged by sin. So this is all within the context of sin and repentance, not magic, not psychology, not feelings.

[B]

Right.

[A]

But in the realm of sin and its consequences. And one of those in particular.

[B]

Yeah, right.

[C]

Yeah. Well, as we're wrapping up this pretty exciting in some ways episode of the Lord of Spirits podcast, we had a lot of good calls tonight, too. Yeah, I, I, well, you know, like I said, a number of you in the, the chat on YouTube were asking about exorcism, and we kind of finished up there. And yes, I mean, number one are liturgical acts of exorcism that a priest or bishop performs for. As he said, with baptisms, in some special cases, if someone is evidencing, evincing demonic possession, but also house blessings, like, this is the time of year a lot of people are getting their houses blessed. So, so all of that is there, these priestly acts. But I also wanted to kind of extend that out a Little bit. Because I know that here. My sense is that right now there's a lot of people who are worried about demonic activity and maybe experiencing it in a way that they haven't in the past, or perceiving it in a way that they haven't in the past, sometimes because they or someone they know was quite deliberately involving themselves in it, like in the occult or witchcraft or, you know, whatever it might be, fortune telling mediums, you know, etc. And you might ask like, well, okay, all right, yes, I need to connect with a priest and you know, and have to be baptized or to have my house blessed or whatever is needed. But then also, just because that happens, right, that doesn't mean that all the temptations are going to go away. It doesn't mean that all of your bad habits are going to go away. It doesn't mean that experiences that you have of maybe even being tormented by spiritual attacks are going to go away. So the question is, well, how do I live now? What do I do? I think this is one of the big questions of our moment in history that we are at what am I supposed to do? And the good news is that there's not some kind of special formula or technique or method. What you're supposed to do is to live the Christian life, like be baptized, become part of the church, live in repentance, live in faithfulness. All of the things that are the normal Christian life. Worship together with other believers, prayer together with your family at home, prayer privately, reading the scriptures, participating in the fasts, engaging in almsgiving and acts of active love and charity. These are the, this is, this is the Christian life, right? These things. And the beautiful thing, one of the beautiful things about this, as you live this way, as you put your life in order, as you put your, your house in order, you put, you know, your family in order. All these things, these are all exorcistic acts. All of these things are exorcistic, meaning that they drive out demonic influence. Because there's no neutrality. There's no neutrality. The way that you drive out demonic influence, the way you drive out synergizing with devils, is by synergizing with God, doing his works, participating in what he wills. And that elevates the human person. It heals the human person, right? That's how it works. That doesn't mean there's not going to be temptations. I mean, even we can see with very, very holy people, super holy people, very advanced, they can still be attacked by demons, but the outcome is going to be very different than someone who's saying, okay, well, let's do that, that bad thing, the evil thing. So that's what I want to leave folks with, is that the normal, everyday, ordinary acts of Christian life are actually electrified with spiritual power because Christ said that he would give us grace and save us through our faithfulness. So what do you have to say, Father Stephen?

[A]

So, yeah, related to that, there's this statement Christ makes about exorcisms where he talks about how if you exorcise a demon, the demon goes into these very dry places, right? Out of the desert, you cast out into the desert, out into the wilderness, out into the place of evil, right? But if there's not any kind of change in the person, then it just comes back and moves in with seven of its friends, right? And the person's worse off than they were before. And I think we've maybe taken what Christ is saying there too literally, as in, we've said, well, I haven't literally had any demons cast out of me, so this verse doesn't apply to me. This is kind of an obscurantist thing. But what Christ is actually talking about is something. Because, remember, demonic influence is this spectrum, right? He's really talking about something that we've all experienced, and that's that a lot of this stuff keeps coming back.

[B]

Right?

[A]

I could pretty confidently say that there's probably no one listening to this who's an Orthodox Christian or probably a Roman Catholic either. Who, meaning they go to confession. Who hasn't had to go back and confess the same things over and over and over again? And you don't want them to come back. That's one of the reasons you're bringing them up in confession. You don't, right? You don't want them to come back. You want them to be gone. You want to be done with this for good. You want to never do this again and fall into it again. And it comes back and sometimes it gets worse. And at the core, as hard as it is for us to hear, the core reason that keeps happening is that while we don't want it to come back, we don't want to do the work that would be required for it not to come back. We want the results without the effort. We want confession to sort of be magic. There, I said it. I said it out loud that I did this. I don't want to do it anymore. Now I want to never be tempted again, right? Now I never want to have to think about this again. Now I never want to have to worry about this. Again, are we able to just go through life blissfully peaceful, never, never falling back into sin? But that requires hard work, right? Because all of these things that we've fallen prey to, all of these places where to whatever degree might be a small degree, might be a larger degree, we've given these powers, we've given our enemies. You have enemies, if you don't have any visible ones, you have invisible ones who are out to throw stumbling blocks in our path, who are out to trip us up, who are out to destroy us ultimately, right? Every little bit of turf in our life, every little piece where we've given them some control and a foothold and a finger hold, right? All of those places, even if. Even if the power of God comes in and uproots it, Christ has warned us, if we don't then make the changes we need to make, if we don't then fix the things we need to fix, they're just going to come right back and maybe worse, right? And these changes we need to make in our life, right, we've got a life that's full of all kinds of things. Some of those things are sinful and bad. Part of the problem is we try to replace those with nothing. I say to people in confession a lot, right? If you try to avoid this sin that you're struggling with by sitting in your room and staring at a wall, that ain't gonna work.

[B]

Right?

[A]

If you try to replace something negative, something bad, something evil, with nothing, something insidious with nothing, it's not going to go anywhere. You have to replace it with something positive. And I'm going to double down on what we said last time. Positive does not mean overtly Christian or overtly orthodox Christian, okay? If the temptation you face requires you to go off by yourself and spend time alone, then one of the best things you can replace that with is just spending time with other people, spending time with family members, spending time with friends, out with them in public, right? Spending time in real space with humans, going to church activities, going to other things, right? Thereby removing you from that situation in which you are tempted and filling your life with something good. Even though it's common, it's still good even if you're not. You don't have to be talking about spiritual things. Play darts, right? Dare I say it? Play cards. Sorry, Baptists. Oh, no, Right. Send me a friend request and play Marvel Rivals. Just do something that is good and friendly and even if it's common, that isn't sinful. Fill your life with those things and with good things, and that will help fight this temptation. And then when those things that have bedeviled you, pun intended, in the past, come back, right, and try to get that hold again and try to get that grip again, they'll find that the handles they used to use are now gone. The levers they used to pull, right. Unfortunately for us, our enemies are really crafty and they'll find other ways and we'll have to repeat this process and we'll have to keep doing it. And it's something we'll have to work on our whole life, right? But if you're feeling like a failure and you're feeling like you're trapped in a cycle and you're feeling like you can't get anywhere, this is how to do it. At least this way you'll face new challenges and new struggles instead of the same old ones over and over again. So those are my final thoughts.

[C]

Thank you for that. Well, that's our show tonight, everybody. We appreciate you showing up and listening. And if you didn't get through to us live, we'd still like to hear from you. You can email us at LordOfSpirits and AncientFaith.com you can message us at our Facebook page. You can also leave us a [e-mail] LordOfSpirits and if you have basic questions about Orthodox Christianity or you need help in finding a 3D real life in person parish, head over to OrthodoxIntro.org and.

[A]

Join us for our live broadcast of the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 7pm Eastern, 4pm Pacific. Inside you see more of me Cobwebs in the way.

[C]

If you're on Facebook, you can follow our page, you can join our discussion group, leave all those ratings and the reviews in all the places and most importantly, share this show with a friend who is going to benefit from it.

[A]

Finally, be sure to go to ancientfaith.com stroke support and help make sure we and lots of other AFR podcasters stay on the air. The Magic Cleaner will shine his smile on me.

[C]

Thank you, Good night. God bless you.

[A]

You've been listening to the Lord of Spirits with Orthodox Christian priests, Father Andrew, Stephen Damick and Father Stephen DeYoung, a listener supported presentation of Ancient Faith Radio and I beheld and I heard the voice of many angels round about the throne and the beasts and the elders. And the number of them was 10,000 times 10,000 and thousands of thousands, saying with a loud voice, worthy is the lamb that was slain to receive power and riches and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and Blessing. Revelation, chapter 5, verses 11 through 12.