Are you interested in angels, demons, spirits, ghosts, and monsters? Are you curious about their origins, tales, and influence upon history and on the present day? If so, sit back, relax, and welcome to Southern Demonology, the podcast that explores all of this and more.
Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of Southern Demonology. I am your host, JJ, and I should actually probably say welcome back to myself as well. As anyone who has listened to this podcast, which still surprises the ever-living heck out of me, uh, will know I have been absent for quite a while. I humbly apologize. I've gotten a lot of messages about it. I am actually am going to go over why for the first part of this episode and then tackle another subject for the second one. However, before I do, I do have a very brief announcement.
Tomorrow I am going to be uh attending another podcast called Spirits and More Radio. Uh you can find them at spirits and more radio.com, uh, where we're going to be talking about demons and other things that happen to come up. So um I will definitely be posting a link to that on Southern Demonology.com. Uh so you can find it there, or you can go to their site and find the interview there when they happen to post it up. So that should be really exciting and uh looking forward to that.
So that's actually what prompted me to finally get everything reset up on my new system uh and uh restart this podcast all over again uh because I wanted to make sure that people could actually find that link when it does come out. So, why in the ever-living world have I been away for so long? Um, first, I want to offer my sincere apologies. Uh, I certainly did not mean to be away like this. Um, my life has been kind of overcomplicated uh past six plus months or so, I would say. Um I actually came down with a medical issue, uh nothing severe, thank God.
Um, but it could have turned out to be that way. Uh, but no, I started getting uh very sick off and on ever since November, and uh come to find out I was having uh some um kidney issues and it was misdiagnosed uh by doctors for a while and took a while to get sorted out.
Actually had a minor uh outpatient surgery, uh, which they thought would fix it, and of course that did not, but anyway, uh everything is now back to order, but even before that, I took a new position as the head of development for a uh startup, and my life has been completely consumed by this job, and it's not even so much of a job, it's something that I truly believe in. The mission statement is absolutely phenomenal, and I have poured more blood, sweat, and tears into this place than I ever have before.
Um, something that you may or may not know about me, I don't remember if I've ever discussed this, but I am a workaholic by nature. Um, I put in more effort, I lose more sleep over things that I know that needs to get done. And when you're in a normal position, and especially if you're in development, or at least this is the experience that I am most familiar with, so that's what I will talk about. Um you have a certain set of parameters that you typically work it.
You know, uh uh an employer will hire a senior developer or architect to come in to solve a very specific range of problems, and while you're in there, you can recommend oh, hey, I think this would be a great idea or that would be a great idea, and sometimes they take it take you up on it, and sometimes they don't. But this position has been a revolution because I was hired carte blanche to do what I think needs to be done to meet the business needs, and that has been phenomenal, absolutely phenomenal. Um, not only does ancient languages inspire me, but so does modern technology.
Um, I've been in this field of web development and you know for probably 18, 19 years now, and I've seen it all and done it all pretty much. Um and typically I'll I'll be hired in at a company to do you know consulting work uh or to replace a uh you know a badly performing um subcontractor or contractor, uh contracting company, and uh and build the team back up. Um but in this position I was hired just to make sure everything works.
And uh I've had a lot of ideas kind of swimming in the back of my head and was able to implement them and build up our entire development team and see everything working. It's been phenomenal. Um so that paired with some uh medical concerns really took me out of the loop for quite a while. But things are now beginning to settle down. Uh we're no longer I'm no longer working like 80 hour weeks, uh, which is a very good thing. Actually able to relax just a little bit. And so that's the perfect time to come on back in. So uh thank you for your patience to anyone that happens to be left.
I cannot tell you how much I greatly appreciate that. Um this uh I haven't decided a series of topics next. Uh we're still going to be pumping them out uh once a week. If there are any delays, there we do have a website now, southerndemonology.com. I will be regularly posting updates and small blog posts there uh in addition to the full episode list that you can find. So it's we're gonna be back on schedule. So um thank you all for hanging in there, and I I hope that you're still excited for this. I'm still excited to talk about things.
I have some really uh neat ideas coming up, so I hope that you will stay tuned for that. With apologies out of the way, I want to delve into another topic which is at least of interest to me and hopefully to some of y'all out there. Uh during the summer, I was able to take my youngest daughter to a uh summer program that she got into, which just happened to be located about five minutes away from where I went to college. And while I was uh down there, I was able to meet up with my uh major professor from undergrad.
This man is an absolute genius, and come to find out, he is about a semester or two away from retirement. Which just completely blew my mind. Um, but uh I'm good friends with him and his wife who I had gone on uh several different uh different field trips for the Virginia Collegiate Honors Council back in the day and was able to meet up with him for lunch and my professor, who actually found out I was the only student he had for guests classical Ethiopic. Which really took my breath away because I I honestly had no idea whatsoever that that was the case.
Which I mean it was already the fact that I was able to learn at the feet of a master of a language was already an you know, a a stupendous experience, but to find out I'm the only one who had that said experience it left me an awe and also sad that other people couldn't have experienced the joy that I did. But um while we were there and catching up, he was able to bring some documents and get as that uh he had received. And A, I was mortified about how much I have had forgotten. Uh but B, it it lit a fire underneath me.
Here were these documents of a a very old work which is so important to modern interpretations of, you know, Second Temple Judaism and everything that it encountered. That I I couldn't just instantly translate it on the spot. I mean there of course there are words that I knew, but still it's a very difficult language and I had been away from it for years. And from that experience I decided to blend my current skills with my past skills and begin and I have already started creating a uh a get as transliteration engine and translation engine.
Um it's gonna be a uh a tool that will be used to uh you can type in uh romanized uh get us and then it will produce Unicode uh you know Ethiopic characters in the native Fidel and then it will prompt all of the translations that you need so that you can then custom craft one. Currently I'm about forty percent done with this project. I've already got a few beta users that are coming out.
Um my goal is to be able to take this tool and go to repositories of get as documents uh that especially relate to uh angerology and demonology and certain parts of the pseudopigrapha and modern collections of tales and just rapidly translate them out. Uh maybe publish them, maybe not. I haven't gotten that far down the pike. Uh, but the other piece of this is that I'm truly hoping to be able to join in um translation teams that are already in existence that are doing such vital work in this field that I've had no part of. Um, and there I know that they're looking for qualified individuals.
So I have already been going through the grammars again. I'm about halfway done. I'm building this translation tool slowly from the ground up. Um, I've actually created a few medium articles on some of the challenges I've had, especially in rearranging uh MongoDB collections to match custom sorting orders, all this kind of good stuff. Um, but anyway, um as soon as I have some uh more progress and able to take this tool out uh for a spin, I know that um Howard University has some uh great repositories of modern uh DevTra scrolls. Uh I've already approved a lot of their work.
Um and I've heard that uh Catholic University of America has a trove that I'm hoping to be able to uh talk to somebody and and get access to. Uh, but once I have some results of these, um I will definitely be providing some more information and uh posting some you know pictures and translations up.
Um and in a future episode I will be going more over uh Debtura scrolls, and these are scrolls in which um priests custom make uh from the hide of a goat that's specially prepared, and then using the con the literal concept of God gave power over demons to uh to his uh people, they then trap demons inside strolls in order to fuel God's will. Um, and they specifically call out very specific um entities within those papers. Uh so I will be um providing some more information because I've had a few messages about what they are, uh how they relate, uh what they target, that kind of stuff.
So look forward to that. That should be really interesting. I've been tremendously excited about it, but then again, I am adorable.
So I don't expect anyone else to really share my passion unless you've been through all this crap, but we will see. Uh, it will be interesting nonetheless. All right, we're gonna take a real quick break and be back in about 15 to 20 seconds. Thank you. Uh, I hope you forgive me for that, but it's m horror movies. Ever since I was a kid, I have loved horror movies. Of course they scared the crap out of me uh growing up, but I love them nonetheless. And I think that's due to the fact of uh there being so many ghost stories. I mean, they were just ubiquitous.
Um, you drive down the road, you visit a locale, and there would be a ghost story associated with it, and people would just love telling these stories to each other. Uh in fact, I was kind of the class storyteller because I would go to school and retell all of these different ghost stories to all of my friends, and they loved it. I loved it. It was awesome. And it got me hooked on the entire horror genre and have been ever since I can remember. Uh but there's been surprisingly few movies that as an adult has even given me a slight sense of chill.
Um the one I remember the most is probably the Dawn of the Dead remake. And it's not the entire movie, in fact, most of it's garbage, but it was the beginning descent into hell that really threw me for a loop. You know, everything's starting off fine, just like they always do, and then from the course of an evening, normal suburban paradise is replaced with true terror. And the film really conveys the sense of how quickly things go from normal to nightmare. And that chilled me.
That that was just it was so phenomenally done that for the next week or two I would actually open my door to the outside and peek out to make sure that there wasn't something that was going to be charging at me because all of a sudden, you know, normalcy was replaced with, you know, absolutely horrendousness. And another one, I guess, that really kind of got to me was um The Exorcist. But it wasn't the the theatrical release. It was the um the version they produced, God, five, ten years ago. It's kind of sad how I can't remember. Uh, but it was literally called The Version You've Never Seen.
And it's where they took a lot of the um edited out clips and actually put them back into the movie. And it wasn't the the normal ones that people know about, which is, you know, where the little girl crab walks backwards, all that kind of stuff. It was where they actually took some of the more subtle um images of the demon and interspersed it throughout the film film, especially occasionally you would just cut to black and you would only see this stylized makeup face representation of what the demon looked like.
It was those moments that really kind of embedded it with this sense of of just you know, of an o otherworldly presence that was trying to make its will known and influencing all of these events. And it actually tied together kind of some of the the disparity between the uh the elder priest's uh previous experiences and then what was actually happening within uh Washington, DC.
It it was though it's it's those types of things, the ones that will take something and uh elevate it into the real world and conveys a sense of pervasiveness that has always gotten to me, but most movies don't have that, or they if they do, they do it in such a poorly defined way that it absolutely is non-believable. Uh a few examples. So I've whenever I hear about a new indie horror film coming out, I always get excited. Maybe they have actually recaptured that magic and make me fear just a little bit. You know, one of them was it follows.
I was really excited to see this film, and I walked out of that movie theater utterly disappointed. It had so many plot holes, so many parts of that movie were nonsensical that it took me completely out of the storytelling. Uh same thing for uh the latest new one to hit the films, a quiet place. Uh it was lauded at being so well done, and although it was, it too had so many plot holes all over it that it sucked any enjoyment that I had going in. It it's just kinda sad. Another one is the Babadook.
Uh heard such great things about it, saw the trailer, and the picture book they have in that uh movie was really, really well done. It it's you know, that could send chills down someone's spine alone. And yet the movie was so poorly done. There was so much, you know, emphasis on the antagonism of the characters. It it it just sucked me out. It it by no means uh enthused me whatsoever. I mean, to the point where if, you know, I'm looking for something new to watch and almost everything I watch is horror, which is always a problem.
Um but I sit there and go through these uh you know, these lists of the best horror movies to watch on Netflix or Hulu or whatever it happens to be. And if I see one of these films mentioned, I just close the browser page. There's no sense in me going forward, because I know that if whoever that writer happens to be, if they consider one of those movies to be quality horror, then we're on completely different wavelengths. So I I don't even bother. Now you know, a movie that um I've heard a lot about and I'm looking forward to watching with cautious, cautious optimism is hereditary.
And but then again, it's probably gonna fall into the same trap that the other these other ones have. So I don't know. But the reason I've been thinking about this is um, you know, the nun um is coming out on Friday and it follows the Conjuring universe. I really enjoy the the first Conjuring and the second one. Um the first Annabelle uh was really, really p uh a poorly done money grab. Uh but the second one actually was really good, um, to the point where I sustained injury from my wife gripping my arm so hard during that movie, uh, which I found really funny.
Um so I'm looking forward to this nun because the imagery of Valak, the demon that has that's portrayed in this one, um, is actually really, really well done. So I I can't say I've ever been scared by one of those movies by any sense of the imagination, but yet yet they're so interesting that you can't help uh but enjoy it. But instead of just bemoaning the fact that there are no scary movies, uh I will produ I will give you three recommendations of films that I've seen kind of recently, um that hopefully you will enjoy as well. Um the first one can be found on Netflix.
Uh it's called The Nightmare, which is supposedly a documentary about sleep paralysis, which is in itself an absolutely fascinating subject. One that I would love to be able to do some more research into um and report back on at some point. But sleep paralysis is supposedly a condition where one wakes up in the night, they are conscious, but they cannot move. Uh, you know, there are numerous psychological, um, and physiological explanations for why this may happen, but there are also quite a few supernatural ones. And it's that latter part that I'm really, really curious about.
But the movie does a really good job of explaining it and actually showcasing quite a few victims that have uh fallen prey to it over the years. Um, and and the other two are Japanese films. Uh the first one is called Noroi, which translated means curse in Japanese. It is a found footage uh film, but don't hold that against it. This movie is long. It is convoluted and complex. Um in fact it's usually like the number one criticism leveled against it. But to me, it was phenomenal. Like it is I won't say deep, but it has so many twists and turns to it, but not in normal Hollywood style.
They're very subtle, they just follow this one paranormal investigator as he keeps running into these seen same types of symbols and then starts delving into what they could possibly mean. It's fascinating. I I really, really love that movie. It's in fact it's probably my favorite horror movie that I've seen in a couple of uh years. It's a little bit older. It's produced, I believe, in the late 90s, but can't recommend it enough. Uh and the other one is actually one that I watched with my wife uh just the other night, uh, called I Am a Hero. And it's a zombie movie. I I love zombie movies.
I know most people probably don't, but they're just my cup of tea. In fact, I I've reviewed quite a few uh independent zombie uh novels out there. Um if you go to uh ubergeekreviews.com, uh you'll actually will find a lot of my reading lists, and I've got a lot because I've linked it up to my good reads in addition to my normal reviews. But I love zombie films. And this one was completely campy. Uh it was no no means uh realistic by any stretch of the imagination. It definitely wasn't scary, but it blended comedy with horror, which is honestly one of my favorite things.
Um you see this within a lot of the really well done horror series. Um you just go to the Twilight Zone, you know, not most of you know, most people just remember a few classic episodes from that series, but there were such wonderful comedic overtones to a lot of those that they really threw the the user for a a loop, you know. They didn't kind of pigeonhole themselves into one little subgenre, instead it explored a lot of different avenues, and it's phenomenal. Same thing for uh you know, Shawn of the Dead, uh all of these ones, they're just ugh.
I don't know what it is, but I truly enjoy that. So, anyway, that I think that's enough of me rambling on. We're about at that time. Thank you for tuning in after such a long absence. Uh, again, I apologize and I hope you stay tuned. Uh, we will be kicking this off on a very regular schedule again. So, uh, but you know, it is what it is, but I will try not to let work get in my way, I promise you. So, anyway, thank you again for joining. Uh, be sure to uh tune in to uh the other podcasts that I will be on uh if you have the time for it, uh spiritsandmore radio.com.
And I will see y'all next week. Thank y'all very much. This has been Southern Demonology. Please feel free to contact us at Southern Demonology at gmail.com. We hope that you join us again for our next episode.