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Hello all, and welcome back to another episode of Southern Demonology. And as always, I'm JJ. I'm excited to announce that this is the first episode in a series regarding the named demons from their origins, lore, and references today. These won't be done sequentially as I've been having so many exciting conversations with members of the Southern Demonology Discord group that I actually have a ton of topics lined up. Yet this is perhaps the most requested topic that I've keep having people ask me to do.
And I wanted to get this first episode done quickly, uh but with as much justice as it deserves. And honestly, where else should one start than with the center of attraction? The devil. But as I usually like to do, I'm gonna start off with some personal stuff first before we actually get into that piece of it. You know, the human mind is an amazing thing. For any developers out there who have ever done anything with machine learning, the brain becomes even more outstanding for the sheer amount of data mining and categorization that it can do.
Of course, we've only begun to scratch the surface of the mind's capabilities, and I am most definitely not a neuroscientist by any stretch of the imagination. All I can do is look through the lens of philosophy and see how a worldview is so readily established. Some aspects are straight adopted from the environment in which a person lives. Everything from politics to sports teams are normally usually straight graphs from parent to or guardian to child, unless that kid encounters situations that make it him or her call into question those bedrock underpintings to worldview.
Another such graph? Religion. I was very fortunate in growing up. My mother gave me the freedom to choose whatever flavor of belief I wanted. And so I started visiting churches. All of them were Protestant, as even though there's a church every mile where I grew up, all of them were just flavors of generic Protestantism. And that's because the preachers in these churches usually had no formal education in theology or even the bedrock tenets of their respective denomination. Rather, they just followed in the footsteps of others as they had learned from.
Yet there was one thing that all of them haven't have in common, and that would be hellfire and brimstone sermons. Where I'm from, which can be described as the belt buckle to the Bible belt, hellfire and brimstone sermons are the bread and butter of Sunday mornings, and I soaked in my fair share of such teachings to the point where the devil was as real to me, if not more so than anything else. You know, to a kid, it's easy to extrapolate from a few sources something that becomes a living breathing system. I mean God, I did that with ninjas.
After watching as many bad B rated movies on Saturday afternoon that TV could offer, I had devised an entire secret hierarchy of ninjas. You know, black ninjas were the apex predator that thrived in the night. Blue ninjas rolled the twilight and specialized in ranged attacks, white ninjas like pre-dawn and prone and dawn attacks. Now did any of that mirror reality? Of course not. But extrapolating out and combining multiple movies into a living, breathing lore made sense.
And if a child can do that with ninjas, imagine what they can do with the devil and demons that are said to rule this world with hate, shadow, and flame. He don't think I've ever shared this particular story with anyone before. I was seven years old or so. And I was lying down on the couch watching TV. I was alone as my mom was at work and my grandmother was out somewhere. I honestly don't remember. It was night, and something tickled the back of my brain. It was an impulse.
I have no idea where it came from, but I would come to regret it later, as it became a very unwelcome visitor in my thoughts for the next two or three decades. An errant thought suggested that I should bet the devil myself. And it wouldn't be over anything major, like a musical contest, God help us. Instead it would be over something trivial. Like if the next commercial that came on was the one I was thinking about. In other words, it was something entirely up to chance.
And so with my heart beating fast, I decided on whatever the insec inconsequential thing would I would bet upon would be, and I lost I lost. And a few hours later, my mom came home from work to see her son crawled into a fetal position, crying hysterically, because I knew that I had just bargained my soul away to the devil. And I can only imagine working a full shift, driving 30 minutes, being tired as hell, walking in to something like that. If I haven't said it before, my mom is an absolute saint. But she was able to calm me down and convince me that no, there's no such way that's possible.
And I latched on to those assurances like a drowning man to a piece of float song. And I felt better. Yet from that day onward, that impulse to wager again would tickle the back of my brain. And I developed a litany against it. And it's nothing special. It's something so obvious anyone would say it, but I would repeat to myself mentally, not out loud. I mean I yes, I can be a tad crazy, but I'm not cer full on certifiable, thank you very much. I will never bet. I will never bet, I will never bet. And I would repeat that to myself over and over and over in my head.
And this lasted not one week or one month or one year or even one decade. But rather closer to three. At least once a minute. I would think that to myself. And over the years it became a habit. Even without that urge in the back of my brain. I would recite it to myself over and over. And thinking back on it, I've gotta tell you, that was a habit that was just mentally exhausting. Somewhere along the way, I broke that habit, and uh pray to God it stays that way. And I haven't suffered through it for God, eight, ten years now. I have no idea when. I certainly didn't keep track of it.
I was just very thankful that that was absent from my from my mind for so long. I like to practice brutal self-honesty. If I'm being an idiot, then I want to be the first one to call myself on that. Doesn't always work, especially when I'm in the heat of the moment, but it it's something that I feel is extremely important to do. And yet for all of that and shining a light upon these dark hidden things in my brain, I have learned a great deal about myself. And in this case, I've learned that I have more than a few tendencies to be OCD.
Of course, upon hearing all this, you've deduced that as soon as I started talking, but that's beside the point. But the point to all of this isn't to embarrass myself as much as humanly possible, though that is likely a very guaranteed side effect. Rather I wanted to demonstrate just how central the devil was to me in my formative years. And in addition to reading everything I could get my hands on at the time about dragons and wizards, aliens and strange phenomena, Time Life produced these wonderfully illustrated bound boats on all of these topics, and my mom got them for me.
Hell, I have all of them to this very day. If you have these and want to reminisce with me about them, speak up, contact me, let me know. I would love to talk about it. But I did the exact same thing about the devil and demons. When I would hear something incorrectly said about, you know, their miscategorization, I would get really upset. For example, if a preacher or a TV show confused Baselb for the devil, I would silently scream to myself No, how could you make such a simple mistake?
As an aside, if there are any producers or writers out there wanting to get actual lore in history, I do provide consultation services. Wink wink just to let you know. Yet as I started to actually study these topics in college, grad school, and beyond, I found that I've had to unlearn a phenomenal amount of these childhood childhood walled building data mind things that I thought were true. Who would have guessed? Just like with ninjas, pop culture and movies don't get everything right.
So I'm going to have to break this episode into two, as I have rambled on this long without even getting to the names of the devil. But because of the subject matter at hand, I want to end this episode with a prayer of protection. One that comes naturally to Catholics in circumstances like these. The prayer to Saint Michael the Archangel. And then to examine that, take some of the lessons that we have I've been talking about in previous episodes, and bring that to bear and see all of the hidden gems of Second Temple Judaism that is embedded within Anyway, on to the prayer.
Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray. And do thou, O Prince of the Heavenly Host, by the power of God, thrust into hell Satan and all evil spirits who wander through the world for the ruin of souls. So we return to the battle theme, which we saw in Psalm ninety-one. And the prayer urges Saint Michael, whose name, of course, Mekhael, who is like God, literally from Hebrew, to be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil.
And we've seen how snares features prominently into demonic entities. Pits and traps.
Snares, fowlers, all of these things relate to these creatures that like to suddenly strike in suddenness to borrow the phrase from 4Q five ten and eleven from found at Qumran. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray, and do thou, O prince of the heavenly host, by the power of God, thrust into hell Satan and all evil spirits. That phrase evil spirits Isn't that really kind of a peculiar turn of phrase? Because you would expect this to say demons, right? But instead it's referring to evil spirits who wander through the world for the ruin of souls.
My friends, I think that this harkens back to the book of Enoch. And something that has been it's a belief that has been carried throughout from that book into present day. I want to read just a little bit to you. Okay, so this is from chapter fifteen verse four. And though you are all holy, spiritual, living the eternal life, you have defiled yourselves with the blood of women, and have begotten with the blood of flesh, and as the children of men have lusted after flesh and blood as those who die and perish from chapter verses eight through eleven.
And now the giants, the Nephilim, who are proceeded from their bodies, because they are born from men and from the holy watchers as their beginning and primal origin, they shall be evil spirits on earth, and evil spirits they shall be called. As for the spirits of heaven, and heaven shall be their dwelling, but as for the spirits of the earth which were born upon the earth, only earth shall be their dwelling, and the spirits of the giants afflict, oppress, destroy, attack, do battle, and work destruction on the earth and cause trouble.
They take no food, but nevertheless hunger and thirst and cause offenses, and these spirits shall rise up against the children of men and against the women, because they have proceeded from them. This is an amazing cosmological view because it's making a distinction between these things are have their origins in spirit, and they belong in heaven. These other things are spirits of the earth and shall always live on the earth, and that is humanity. Yet the watchers sinned so greatly not just because they came down and fornicated with women, or as they say, got wives and monsters.
And it's not that they just taught humanity all of the secret arts such as warfare and blacksmithing and magic and believe it or not, make up is one of their major sins. But it's the fact that they allowed the commingling of spirit. spirit and flesh and it's that which defied the nor to the natural order. So even though so in the book of Enoch, the reason for the deluge is because A, the watchers screwed up so badly and B, the giants were running amok, eating and fornicating with everything they possibly could, so the only recourse was to essentially hit the reset button.
However, the reset button didn't really work. So yes the watchers were confined for seventy generations or until the the ends of the ends of uh of time the wa the Nephilim, the giants, were sent against one another in battle so that quote unquote length of days they shall not have but yet even then it didn't solve the problem of the giants because they are external.
They are now just evil spirits that are floating around in the aether and that harkens back to you know the um the the the Akkadian gods uh of air and wind and how those kind of promulgated up to Lilith and night hags and other things that inhabit the dw the desert these things are now just unleashed upon the world and water can't destroy air so these things are just floating around and they hate humanity they still hunger and thirst What does that remind you of things hunger and thirst but yet can never be slaked or sated That's essentially almost every modern tale of undead that we have you know they zombies and or you know if you if you've ever played DD, uh you know zombies and girls they hate the living because they have what they don't Well that is a nugget frozen in time taken from Second Temple Judaism and the prayer to Saint Michael archives this concept and preserves it and that is being preserved from this idea that the Nephilim are still floating around trying to cause trouble for everybody on earth which I I I I just I I truly find fascinating.
So you have to forgive me for not being able to delve a little bit deeper um into the names of the devil because it really is a fascinating subject and I promise you I will be getting back to this topic very soon. There are one or two other topics that may be coming up beforehand. I have one upon the nature of dualism and Zoroastrianism that I think are going to be really really interesting and I hope you stick around for that one. There's a passage that I found in um in one of the texts that just blew me away and I I have to share that with you.
I think that you're really going to find it interesting.
And then there's another um which is about a gin I actually had a contact a person reach out to me for the very first time from Iran first time I've ever had someone from that uh from that country reach out and asked about gin if that would be a possible um a possible topic for discussion which I've always been fascinated by always wanted to get into it and luckily there were some phenomenal movies out there about that um if you've ever if you have Netflix and if you haven't seen Under the Shadow which is actually based in Iran and it's all about Jen it's a phenomenal movie.
I really really loved it and actually just ran across um another trilogy on Netflix called uh Dabe The Possession uh it's a Turkish film. Uh the first one besides one little caveat it was truly truly interesting and uh actually found out that um uh one of my coworkers uh is uh is a a tuck a Turkish Muslim and we've been having a lot of conversations about Jinn just in general and I may try to see if he's up for an interview on the topic because I think you would I think it would be interesting.
I find it interesting if nothing else so you know how that goes but um yeah so that is about it for for this episode I did want to say um well I wanted to encourage everybody to go to the website southerndemonology.
com there we actually just unleashed a new blog system one of the great things is our Discord community has really been blowing up and getting a lot more active and one of our members um SC Killa had suggested us to do a weekly uh discussion topic so uh we have a running list of topics that we vote on and that's all stored in a Google Doc which is available if you join our Discord and you can see it and add to it whatever um and then every week we vote and for the past two weeks running we have actually been talking about the book of Enoch so that's why this has all been very fresh in my brain um and it's been interesting but I've been able to take um sort of recaps of our discussions and post them as blogs um on the website so it's some really good reading there some actually some graphical work to um to explain some of my thoughts and reasonings around certain things uh but it's been a a ton of fun and uh if you would like to join please come join our discord uh if you would like to um it's free of course discord's always free uh but the link um is right there on the website uh both at the very top in a banner and also in the middle of the front page uh we have a community section uh where one of the items is discord and you get the link there as well the other section in our community is actually a Patreon page um there is no requirement or expectation that you would give money uh to help support this podcast um if you happen to have a few dollars lying around uh I I would welcome uh it because you know this is not a free enterprise to produce and I make no money off it whatsoever no ads no nothing because of course I'm not popular enough uh but regardless um if you have something lying around and you would like to support that would be wonderful uh because there are a few things that could be really useful to the channel and everything else but uh again not required um but yeah our website's great uh you can contact me I always respond to everyone that sends me a message so please feel free to write and otherwise you can always find us on Facebook it's uh facebook.
com slash southern demonology we actually reached over three hundred people that have liked and followed the page which is fantastic I'm sure that you know for people that deal with millions of followers that sounds like nothing but to me it means a more than I could ever tell you you know if my ramblings help even one person or you know make someone learn something new for the first time even if it's just one person that it means all all of this worth it but even more than that just it's the community you know all of the Discord conversations that we've had um to people writing me uh I've had phone calls with people to advise on you know certain bad things that they have encountered or is going on um or just reaching out to say hi and thank you those things when I get one of those messages it it just brightens my day uh it means the world so if you just want to reach out whether it's to ask a question to suggest an episode topic or just to say hi please feel free to do so I I would love to hear from you but it's not a requirement if you like the podcast and just want to keep listening to it that's fine too whichever way floats your boat is more than happy by me.
So anyway thank you for tuning in uh again I truly appreciate it and until next time stay safe ProFootball is back and so are the predictions.