Demons

Call me stupid, but I believe in them.

It’s laughable and hardly fashionable to believe in an invisible force of destruction busily working against us, a force not of our own selves. Aren’t we enough? Of course we are, says prevailing wisdom. There are no invisible “others” trying to harm us, it says. If you look in the mirror and see a werewolf, as Texas singer James Hand said he did, everyone – friends, family, psych people, most priests and a few preachers – will say that you’re having a psychotic or schizophrenic episode, either of which can be explained by empirical science.

No one is a bigger fan of empirical science than me. The wonders shown through telescopes and microscopes have defined me quite a bit. Science has shown the face of God and brought me closer to his works and perhaps his plan, if he has one the way we understand such things. But empirical science is neither a finished thing nor the only thing. We conjectured, postulated and theorized but didn’t truly believe in atoms until we could see them. After the viewing we say, okay, believe now or we’ll make fun of you and those people who think the moon landings were fake. But we could still be wrong. Science can come up with another explanation, a different proof for the same thing. Light is a wave, but wait, it consists of particles, too. (Jesus withered the fig tree with a curse, or he didn’t.) Let’s get our reportage straight, if possible. It doesn’t seem possible. Our understanding of the Big Bang has changed with each new theory’s proof. Will our understanding of it change again? Probably.

I’m not an atheist, but I’m also not one who believes that the Good Book is the infallible word of God; I know too much about its history and the fallible people who chose which words of God went into it and which ones didn’t make the cut. However, there’s plenty in there of such high practicality that we might as well view them as divine ... those things like the golden rule and the admonition that we are our brother’s keeper. Yeah, welfare is a wreck but it came from a good place paved with good intentions. The Bible has some wonderful advice, and is the granddaddy of all story books. But in Leviticus we are told that it’s okay to take slaves from neighboring countries. Is George W. Bush, who favors amnesty for illegal Mexican immigrants, in possession of a highly modern and sophisticated reading of that passage? I don’t think he’s capable of that. I don’t think that passage is divine enough to appliy to any age in which we find ourselves. It applied to the children of Abraham over two thousand years ago, if it applied at all. The Jews of today aren’t foolish enough to attempt an enslavement of their neighbors after they conquer them just because their scripture – the old testament – tells them they can. And Muslims attempt in the same fashion to make their prophet’s scriptural admonitions apply to the world as it is today. Holy books are like guns: they sit there, harmless, until someone picks them up to justify the slaughter.

Just because I suspect the Bible’s complete divinity doesn’t mean that I discount everything in it that I find uncomfortable. It’s said that Jesus tossed seven devils out of Mary Magdalene. That makes me uncomfortable. But I’ve had some uncomfortable experiences.

I believe in devils. As some kind of Christian, I’m allowed to. I believe in a force of evil, one that has an existence outside ourselves. It is autonomous, powerful and real, and many people are infested. It doesn’t need bodies to exist, but it likes them and uses them. We come up with other names for this thing, because we’re in that age of thinking we know a lot and can explain a lot befitting our comfort levels. I don’t think we know a lot. We’re good with words and microscopes, those things that tell less than half the story, but we don’t know shit. We’re still abusing, raping, maiming torturing and killing each other by the millions for no good reason. We’re still – we, us, university grads – we’re still bombing people into the Stone Age over ideologies. The Age of Enlightenment never arrived. Civilization is a buzzword from the marketing department.

It’s possible that these demons I believe in don’t have an existence apart from us; it may be that if everyone refused to believe in them they’d just fade away, since it was possibly our belief that allowed them a manifest existence. But I think that they’ve been here longer than homo sapiens and our ability to believe this or that.

For years I’ve enjoyed a story from a book of mine of a Spanish priest from the 19th century, Father Francisco Palau. Late in his life he bought a hospice and cared for the mentally ill. He exorcised all of these patients and many were cured; I don’t know how many. Of course this proves nothing. (But I would love to see a modern study of this nature carried out and observed by our precious empirical science.) I don’t like the book it came from; it’s folksy and Catholic to the hilt, believing in the power of things like holy medals and pictures of saints even more than I do. The book is more superstitious than I am, but that one story intrigues me.

And to counter that book we have those from psychology, which tell me not to trust that first book. Psychology explains a lot, but they’re still having a little trouble with “fields,” those phenomena wherein things move or fly around a room. They’re working on it.

I don’t know if that Korean kid at Virginia Tech was possessed by foul-mouthed, cloven-footed devils or just driven to madness by rejection. No idea. But I believe in devils because I’ve heard them speak through a mouth close to my ear, and I wish I hadn’t.