10 Reader Responses

1. Fell Says:
   September 14th, 2005 at 6:16 pm

   That was quite fascinating, thank you.

   I wonder where these so-called demons that posses humans exist on the apparent hierarchy amongst beings such as these. I’ve never quite feared these things, seeing them as no more than troublesome entities perhaps more affective then faerie folk. As far as I understand, the demons worked with during evocations of, say, the Lemegeton or Heptaméron are of an order that don’t quite interact with the individual egos of humans. They’re more akin to the mechanics of the universe, no?

2. Tim Boucher Says:
   September 14th, 2005 at 6:25 pm

   My favorite thing about that video is how ordinary they make the whole thing seem.

   I don’t know much about demonology, but it strikes me that there must be entities that simply just get a kick out of possessing people, and screaming and cursing when people put the cross on them. Or, it could simply be that some shadow part of these people needs to be expressed as well. Maybe that’s what brings the entities. Who knows. Anyway, I don’t know where I was going with all this

3. rev max Says:
   September 14th, 2005 at 7:04 pm

   Lots of differnet types of beings possess people in tribal religions.

   Sometimes that is desirable, when it is gods or angels or ancestral spirits or spiritual guides such as deceased magicians. Or even animals such as certain cults in AFrica such as the leopard people or certain cults of syncretic buddhist animism where kickboxers get possessed by tigers, spiders, wolves, etc.

   Othertimes it is undesirable as when it is a restless or irrational ghost that doesn’t understand the ritual that it is participating in and is going against the flow, or is interfering with the life of the person being possessed by mounting them when it is dangerous or inconvenient.

   FOr example in Haitian vodoun the Ghede are very lively spirits that are bawdy party animals and very profane. They will possess people at the beginning of certain rituals and everybody loves it becauses they are very funny and energetic. But then after a while they need to go away again so that the next phase can proceed and they don’t always want to, then they have to be sent away.

   There are specific techniques that people use to bring on possession or to end it quickly or bring it back under control in a lot of these cuyltures. Its sort of like controlled loss of control - it seems chaotic but there is a method to it.

   But I don’t know if any of the things I have described here would apply in other paradigms such as new-age channelling or goetic demons or UFo abductions or whatnot.

4. Tim Boucher Says:
   September 14th, 2005 at 7:23 pm

   Yeah I think that whole dichotomy between welcome and unwelcome possession is really interesting…

5. alistair Says:
   September 15th, 2005 at 12:03 am

   sorry, but i`m not convinced that possession is seperate from the consciousness of the person experiencing the possession. for instance the catholic possession is a demon intimate in the kjv. occam`s razor. we don`t need to to go further than the consensus of the culture in which the possession occurs to find the cause. the rituals and practices of the culture it`s self is the ground upon which these demons manifest themselves.
   a better line of inquiry might be as to why these possessions occur. in the catholic instance i believe it`s a split created by guilt. the old familiar game. powerful shit. the quakers discovered that they had to back off the unworthyness a touch because large numbers of thier parishoners were commiting suicide. mind control is a sensitive art.
   father malachi martin was the pope`s own exorcist. he was interviewed by art bell and others and he comes across as a theatical old fraud of the highest magnitude. he knew how to play the game. apparently the movie, the exorcist was modelled around his life.

6. alistair Says:
   September 15th, 2005 at 12:18 am

   dick van dyke`s brother on the old t.v. show was shy and quiet but if he had a few drinks and fell asleep he would come around and start singing, joking and playing the banjo. i think possession is a way for people to act out certain issues that are difficult if not impossible to deal with without the yelling and screaming and profanity shown in the video. in what other way can a person act that way without being institutionalised or joining a rock band?

7. Rev max Says:
   September 15th, 2005 at 2:14 am

   we don`t need to to go further than the consensus of the culture in which the possession occurs to find the cause. the rituals and practices of the culture it`s self is the ground upon which these demons manifest themselves.

   Supposedly Haitians who are trying to get out of voodoo cannot just stop going to voodoo rituals and continue going to Catholic church, they have to quit both completely and convert to Protestantism.

   They will do something thats for sure so if they want to put a stop to omens and magic and possessions then they reframe their worldview in a more austere ideology which denies that such things are possible.

8. Daniel Says:
   September 15th, 2005 at 4:01 am

   Whether or not the demon is an external entity or an internal working of the psyche shouldn’t matter, when you look at it from a particular perspective, it’s the same. I’ve seen someone ‘possessed’, they had more strength than normal, crazy look in the eyes and yelling, full of anger. The only thing that brought them out of it was a really sharp pain, and they went back to normal. This could be the possession of the old animal part of the brain over the higher brain functions, or a lifelong symbiote with it’s tendrils wrapped deep into the person where if you were to try and perform an exorcism to get rid of it, it may be more dangerous than keeping it in. The person may feel as if a part of them is missing, or may not notice that part gone, in the case of someone who doesn’t remember certain events or things and rewrites memories in their mind (if you knew the person, you’d say either they are schizo or possessed) where the person doesn’t even know this ’shadow’ self exists. You may be attacked by this person in the ‘possessed’ state, and later when they come out of it, they may have the memory of you attacking them, where they are the victim. Either the mind of these people has a strong denial mechanism or there is something else at work.

   I’ve experienced, or encountered demons and been in their presence. It’s late and I’m not quite sure how to word this, so I’ll type whatever sounds right. The mind can manifest into reality certain things, or anything and everything or whatever. Say it’s time to clean out your unconscious, doing a bit of spiritual transformation and you need to take care of all the repressed memories/feelings/whatnot. These things may take the form of a ‘demon’ and manifest externally from you, to get you to pay attention and deal with it, and they may stay until you figure out how to repress them again or take care of it once and for all. Who doesn’t have repressed thoughts about what they saw on BangedUp or perverse thoughts they were told were to bad to think? These are the ammunition of the demon, the repressed junk you have forgotten about. One repressed thought was brought to the forefront and I had to deal with it for a whole week. It was not a pleasant thought and I won’t repeat it here for yoursakes, but it was during a long period of cleaning out the shitbox and apparently that had to be dealt with. I’ve encountered demons or demonic entities in my dreams, and a lot during the half asleep, half awake dream state and a few wide awake. I’ve ‘felt’ them, as feeling a presence in the room where there is no sight of such a thing. I’ve felt them with actual touch, and grabbed hold of one and punched it. When you are asleep, they like to construct dreamstates around you where you walk into a kind of play they put on where you are the unsuspecting actor, and since most dreams you just go with whatevers taking place anyway, this is an easy thing for them. Why they do it? Who knows, maybe they want energy to feed off of, or they want you to do something you might not otherwise do.
   Hell, one got me to pass up a whole lot of books full of knowledge for some porn. That was one funny fucked up looking demon. And he did it with a grin, pimping out suggestions and influence. It also taught a lesson about not forgetting the carnal desires of the flesh in your quest for spiritual knowledge. Body, mind and spirit must be taken care of. So this encounter didn’t piss me off to much because I gained something.

   and now my computer is freezing up so I’ll stop typing for now.

9. Daniel Says:
   September 15th, 2005 at 4:26 am

   Of course, when in the dream constructs of the demons, you can take control and exert your power and influence on the dream, this usually pisses them off. I’ve had several encounters while I was flying around lucid and then got caught by whatever dream they were weaving around me and then make me feel as though I were awake while still in the dream or maybe awake and think I was in a dream, where I’d be in my room but something would be ‘off’.

   One thing they don’t like is you in power, or showing or exerting your power. Since all they have are illusions to trap you with, when you show that you can break through their illusions, they lose their power over you. Then come the stronger illusions, and the little bit more effort it takes to break through them. At one point I starting thinking about the Demiurge and the illusion of the world, and how these seem to be smaller versions of the same thing. How eventually you’d have broken through so many of the incrementally stronger illusions that your ability to spot an illusion and dispell it would be so great that you could recognize the Grand Illusion and exert your power and influence over it, as in a lucid dream. Similar to the Archons as helpers, where here they’d be helping you overcome the illusion rather than trying to trap you in them.

10. alistair Says:
    September 15th, 2005 at 7:36 am

    in the video of possession the priest said that some of those possessed levitated and some walked on water. if he`d videoed that he would have made news. my point is that all of effects of these demons occur in the mind of the witness. they can certainly be useful as ways to deal with situations but it is unnecessary to add another species of entity to explain the process. i think it can be disempowering to give such an ability over to demons. we are the one`s creating here. the grand illusion still remains nontheless.