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 and welcome back to Southern Demonology. Uh this episode is a little delayed, and for that I humbly apologize. Um early last week I got hit by a doozy of a sinus infection. So I left me uh coughing, snotty, and miserable for quite a while. Um even now it still has me in its grasp. It's just much, much weaker, thank goodness. So if uh you hear the occasional sniffle on this episode, I uh beg you to forgive me because it's not intentional. Uh in fact, I feel like I've already have uh put off recording this uh way uh too much and uh am anxious to get back into it.
So if you can uh bear with my voice sounding like a chorus of bullfrogs for uh few minutes, then uh I greatly uh beg your indulgence on that one. So uh we are getting back into the whole topic of uh the pertinatural and the demonic. Uh this is the second episode in the mini-series. I'm pretty sure we're gonna reach three episodes in this mini-series, and we're only going to be really scratching the surface of this topic. It is absolutely vast, uh, but we we will endeavor to get through a lot of the baselines of it um so that we can build upon that in uh future episodes going forward.
Before we do though, I do have uh two quick housekeeping notes uh to uh to broadcast here. Uh the first is uh in looking at SoundCloud, um we have now reached over a hundred listens on our first episode, and uh it's getting there for our for the other episodes in this series. Uh for those that uh have tuned in uh and are continuing to tune in, I really, really appreciate it. I never thought that so many people would be listening, and that number is huge for me. I mean, I I honestly thought it would take months and months for that to happen. Uh so thank you.
Uh second, uh you can find this podcast on a couple of different venues now. Uh we so first the SoundCloud, that's actually where is uh that's the platform in which we're publishing the uh public RSS for this uh for this series. So can't really thank them enough for uh actually providing that kind of a service. Uh second, uh you can find it on uh iTunes, on Blueberry, which I really don't think anyone is using anymore, um, and then also on a Google Play. So um however you've been listening to it, that's great, but there are other avenues just in case uh you want to go that route.
Uh further, uh the domain name uh has already been purchased for southerndemonology.com, and I'm about halfway setting up that site. Uh so in the future, and I'm really hoping that's going to be by the end of next week, uh, you will be able to uh go to Southern Demonology.com. Uh, you will see transcripts of um these shows, uh, direct links to each episode, uh, a much more robust uh summary for each episode, and hopefully also a commenting system so that uh you can actually uh we can form a small community.
And also it's gonna be a great place for me to be able to publicize uh if there is going to be a minor delay in an episode coming forth. Uh, I really hope that's not going to be the case. I will absolutely strive and endeavor to get this released uh by the end of the weekend uh every week, but just in case the unexpected creeps up like it did this time, um I want to make sure that people are aware and you're not just wondering, well, did he fall off the face of the planet? Is he no longer doing this? Um because uh I am absolutely committed to this uh endeavor.
It has been a lot of fun for me to be able to use a lot of this knowledge um and try to broadcast some of it out. Um for those that don't know, I am a uh a web developer and an architect, uh, mainly in JavaScript land. Uh I love getting to do that. In fact, that's what kind of tempted me away from going even much more further into debt uh for student loans um than actually trying to pursue a PhD in this stuff.
Um you know, by the end of my graduate career career, I was uh spending uh eight to twelve hours in libraries, and they were phenomenal libraries, uh getting to translate really strange uh demonic text or scrolls that were found in uh Ethiopia, uh and it was great, but there also wasn't quite the future that I had hoped in it, and uh at that point I had been doing web development and uh was having a lot of fun doing that. So, in fact, uh just uh one really quick plug.
Um if you are a big reader, uh you like uh fiction, whether it be uh horror or zombie novels or lit RPG or sci-fi or fantasy, uh whatever it may be, um, then uh I've just launched a uh a new site called uh Uber Geekreviews.com. Um I read a ton of independently published uh novels, uh, and I absolutely love them and I've been doing this for a while now, and um I figured why not provide a resource for people uh who want to find something to read uh and to be able to go uh just to have a one-stop shop to go and say, Oh hey, I'm looking for a new series, how about this? Um so uh end of plug.
I won't do it again, promise. But anyway, uh so the I want to start off this episode by relating a uh a quick story slash parable because I think it will be a good introduction to all of this. So in my senior year of college uh was in no actually it wasn't my senior year, it was my sophomore year in college. Anyway, I got to take a uh a high level four hundred seminar, um, in the religion department, and we had to write a p pretty massive paper, and I chose the topic of theodicy, uh, which is the justification of God, or since there's so much evil in this world, uh how can God exist?
That kind of a topic. And I uh was doing a lot of research and uh came across a um a book in which it began with a story. So two adventurers were out and about and they come across a garden. And it is not just any garden, but the most magnificent garden that anyone has ever seen. Um filled with tons of varieties of plants, everything was strictly ordered, everything had its place, it was magnificent. And after the two adventurers overcame their initial awe, the first adventurer said, This place has to have a gardener. It has to.
So the two went and looked, and they looked, they combed every inch of this garden and they found nobody. So the second garden second explorer said, Well, that answers that question. There is no gardener. And the first explorer says, No, I refuse to accept that. There has to be a gardener. It's just that, well, I guess that this gardener is invisible. So they go and they get dogs, they uh put up fences, uh, they get every technological advantage they can possibly get, and they uh comb this entire garden once again, and they predictably come up with nothing.
So second explorer says, See, my point still stands. There is no gardener. And the first explorer says, No, that is not true. Um, it's just that this gardener must not only be invisible, but also undetectable. Well, then they ask, Well, what's the entire point of this garden? And they try to come up with reasons why this garden would exist out in the middle of this entire vast tract of unexplored lands. And they come up with nothing, and they find no documents, no anything. And so the third second explorer once again says, Look, uh, this has to be the nail in the coffin. There is no gardener.
And the first one says, No, it's just that this gardener must be invisible, undetectable, and unknowable, which leads the second explorer to say, Well, what's the difference between that and no gardener at all? And welcome back. So, that story is obviously uh a parable regarding God and the world. Uh, what's the difference between there being no God and one that is completely absent, um, or at least is so uh undetectable that you have no idea if he's there or not.
Now, there have been many answers to this over the years, and we're not going to get into all of them, but you know, one of them was by uh the philosopher Immanuel Kant, who said that you know, there is no category for God uh which leaves all the more room for faith. Well, when we look at the flip side of the house, the demonic, the same can be said there as well, to an extent. Um, in fact, uh C.S. Lewis is famous for saying that, you know, one of the greatest tricks of the devil is uh convincing people that he does not exist.
Um and really outside of Hellfire and Brimstone speeches that you may encounter uh within a church, a lot of religious organizations have backed away from the concept of the demonic or the devil. Um even the Roman Catholic Church has uh with the advent of um uh the second of the Second Vatican Council. But let's take a step back from that. Um so when we, you know, want to examine God, there are tons of source material out there. When it comes to demons, not quite so much.
So if we as I've already said, um if you look at the Hebrew Bible, there are few instances, if any, that one can point to and says, Yes, this is referring to uh the demonic. And that makes complete sense because in ancient Judaism there really wasn't a concept of hell. Uh yes, there is shale, which is commonly what it that's referred to, uh but in ancient Judaism there really wasn't just one place where bad people kind of go. Uh in fact, the afterlife itself was kind of just this gray, dreary existence from which people just kind of hung out.
So if you don't have a fleshed out concept of really bad place, then you're not going to have denizens of this bad place which you can add to your uh canonical uh mythology. Further complicating this matter is a phenomenon I've typically refer to as religious cross-pollination obfuscation, which happens a great deal. So religions do not exist in isolation from each other. Uh there always are muddied waters.
And within uh one religious tradition, you will often find that they have co-opted uh ideals or even deities from other religions and brought them in, but put them into radically different contexts. Uh, we've seen this within uh Zoroastrianism and Buddha I mean in a Hinduism, where uh the god of Zoroastrianism is made into a minor demon in Hinduism, and then the god the deities of Hinduism uh become dem ProFootball is back, and so are the predictions.
But we also see this within Judaism. For example, um Lilith, which most people know and I've talked about briefly within the previous episode, uh was originally an Akkadian goddess of wind, uh very powerful, very sublime. But within Judaism, you find this being relegated to a evil spirit, a night hag, uh, who resides within Dudael, which is the place where all the bad things happen to reside.
So if you're trying to get to a truth or a canonical source of what's bad, what could really hurt me, you're going to come across this cross-polonization, uh, where you've one religion has co-opted a deity and made it into something radically different. So that really kind of confuses the issue. In fact, uh there is a really strong argument that one can make in that uh ancient Judaism was not really monotheistic. Uh most people assume that all of the Judeo Christian tradition uh is rooted solidly within monotheism, but that's not really the case.
Uh for example, I mean if you come to the the Christian uh Ten Commandments or uh the you know the Decalogue you don't have God saying you won't believe in other gods. What you have is you shall not put any other gods before me. Meaning that as long as you always pay attention to God as number one, you can acknowledge other deities but you're just never going to put them above God. So this is kind of acknowledging the fact that, you know, ancient Judaism existed within a really polytheistic culture and kind of embraced that. Uh it just said that God is always going to be number one.
So the source materials for for ancient times um is problematic. So we don't really find too much to really point to and say, aha, this is where we get really bad stuff. That changes with Second Temple Judaism. In my very first podcast episode of this series, I said that it's pretty easy to find remnants of Second Temple Judaism beliefs firmly embedded within current uh theological thinking. Um really, even within just um modern. Beliefs. And this is one of the most glaring examples of that. Because as you'll see, Second Temple Judaism points out the greatest enemy of humanity.
And that is, simply put, the angels themselves. We'll be right back. Back then, there were seventy nations. Each nation was believed to have an angel that led it. And yet, all of these nations, or a vast majority of them, kept persecuting Israel, God's chosen nation. Which led to the idea that there must be bad angels out there. And then we come to first Enoch. And Enoch provides a lot of answers and precursors for us.
We have the group of watchers, and in Ethioptic it really is watchers or those who watch, who look upon the generations of man because they've been commanded to by God, but then bind themselves in a curse to go down out of selfishness, uh, and lust to copulate with the daughters of man, and thereby unleashing the giants which fornicate and lust with everything they can possibly get their hands on. It is these watchers that are the result of the deluge. These watchers are the reason why God unleashed the flood and they are bound and thrown into Dudael.
Once again, the desert that holds all the bad things. In fact, Dudael was pretty much a precursor to the idea of hell. It is hell on earth. This is where all of the evil creatures that could ever exist are either thrown into uh or bound. Uh it's the place in which you just do not want to go. So all of these texts and ideas form the concept that these corrupted angels are not only powerful, but also dead set against humanity.
And then we come to the Christian New Testament, and this is further refined, where now we have Lucifer, the light bearer, the most powerful being, second only to God, leads a rebellion in heaven and is then subsequently cast down. So what is a demon? The answer is that it is a corrupted angel. It is a bound angel. And this is not just bad news. This is about as dire news as one could ever hope to hear for a few reasons. First, angels are they are spirit, and which means that they are not confined to the physical world. They exist above it.
It's not saying they cannot influence it, but they are not bound by the physical world whatsoever. It is the ultimate definition of the word supernatural. Demons, though, are bound. They have been restricted, and one of the ways in which they like to play havoc is by actually influencing this world. Demons are no longer supernatural. They are instead per natural. What that means is um the word itself literally means past or beyond nature. But when it comes to theological meanings, it means kind of a limbo state between this world and the divine.
So you have normal world, pertinatural world, and then supernatural world. In the Roman ritual, which is kind of a a handbook for um exorcists, there are two types of exorcism. There is the uh exorcism of person, which most people are familiar with at least, um, and then the uh exorcism of locale. So essentially what this means is that whenever a demon wants to mess with this world, um and in almost every single story or source material that we have, uh demons are dead set against humanity. They have to manifest and be bound by a person or a place or a time.
And we have to remember that angels I mean m when we think of angels, most people were picture, you know, cute little babies with wings or um, you know, some other kind of uh a fluffy uh, you know, uh uh imagining. But angels are scary. Um it's just like being confronted with God or the divine. Um used to have a professor who would always say seeing God is never a good thing. Um and there we have some source materials which actually kind of try to describe that, but the divine is simply too much for the human existence. Uh it literally burns us out.
And now we have angels which are completely radically different than humanity, that are purpose built to be able to stand in the presence of God and to carry out its orders. And now we have a corrupted version of that which is dead set against humanity. This is where the dire news really comes from. Um so I I'm going to leave this here for the moment. And the reason why is um so I started recording this episode last night. And I'm I'm I'm not trying to throw uh coincidences and make them seem oh bad things, you know, are happening for some strange reason. But um I began to get very dizzy.
As I said, I'd been sick. Um and feeling pretty bad. And I actually had like one of the worst cases of heartburn I've ever had, um, to the point where I literally thought I was having a heart attack. Also, while I was recording this, um I heard shouting from outside and I looked and uh I I live in a uh a town uh townhouse complex and one of the townhouses right across the street, uh in the upper window, there was a woman and a man.
I'm guessing they're married, uh, or boyfriend, girlfriend, um just throwing down, I mean, screaming at the top of their lungs, and then the woman proceeded to climb out the second story window and dangle her legs while sitting on the outside of the building, while sitting on the windowsill, like she was about to jump. So seeing that, being really worried, having my phone in my hands, about to call the police because I was afraid something really bad was about to go down, feeling like utter crap, and then laying in bed wondering if uh I had to go be rushed to the hospital or not.
These are not good things, and to have all of this happen while I'm talking about one of the few subject matters that truly chills me to the bone. Um it may have been a fantastic coincidence, um, but it also worried me a great deal. So uh rather than continue this, and we are going to continue this, we're gonna have an episode three. Um, I do believe we're gonna have a break, though, um, because I've been gathering some really great um ghost stories, I should say, uh, not just from my past, but also much more modern occurrences.
Um, I think it's time to introduce the southern part into the demonology that this podcast uh so tries to espouse. So uh we're gonna go into some uh uh more fun yet scary ghost stories in the next episode, and then we'll come back and finish out episode three of this mini-series. So um I hope you look forward to it. I really appreciate you sticking around. Um, I apologize if this podcast was a little bit muddled. Um I it was hard to concentrate, and then with everything that was happening by the end of it, I kind of fell apart. So um anyway, apologies.
I will try not to let that ever happen again, but uh, I don't want to delay this podcast any more than what it already has happened. So, anyway, thank you for joining us again. Uh, I really appreciate uh your um you know your patronage, your listening. Um, and again, if uh I can ever broach a topic that you're really curious about, uh please let me know. I'll be more than happy to address it however I can. Um thank y'all and uh stay safe out there. 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.