PSA: Don’t Eff with demons.
Please and thank you.
Lately I seem to keep happening upon a lot of nonchalant messing where people shouldn’t be messing.
Apparently the guy who did the Watchmen comics- he thinks his drawings are spells or something creepy like that. And apparently people in general are just, “Oh cool, his art is an incantation, that’s cool, live your truth, man, sweet drawrings.”
Wut.
No, it’s not cool.
Demons are fallen angels. The primary significance of this metaphysical fact is not all the sweet tattoo and truck art you can make of bad angels (ugh). They’re evil.
Let’s review what an angel is real quick.
St. Thomas Aquinas is called the Angelic Doctor because he figured out so dang much about these spiritual creatures, and, as far as I know, not a whole lot more has been added to his insights in the centuries since he was on earth thinking about it. He talks about angels in Questions 50 – 64 of the Summa.
Backing up a second to creation in general according to Aquinas and the Tradition: the hierarchy of being: at the bottom you have lifeless stuff like rocks, then you have plants that can grow and reproduce and thus have some kind of soul (vegetative kind), move up another rung to animals, which have a little fancier souls, in that they have senses and memory and such, but they can’t engage in things like abstract reasoning or art or love. Continuing up the ladder, you have the good ol’ familiar body-and-soul humans, then above them are the angels, which are entirely spiritual- no bodies, (though occasionally, as recorded in the Old Testament, they sometimes assume a quasi-body so as to be seen by people and not freak us out.)
At the very top of the hierarchy of being is, of course, is God, source and summit, beginning and end, perfect Being with a capital B. Obviously there’s an increase in perfection as you move up from rocks to the divine, and none of those jumps are insignificant- you can’t make a plant out of however many of the best of rocks, you can’t blend up the right combo of plant souls to jump to animal life, the smartest gorilla/elephant/dolphin supergroup of animal geniuses still aren’t going to ever amount to the odd creature who can do things like have existential crises and read, write, and even sometimes understand poetry (even if he watches YouTube instead, which he can invent, but a pig never will).
Thus, even if we don’t know much about angels, it’s safe to say that they’re naturally significantly higher than us. Smarter, faster, stronger, better. Again, they don’t have bodies, so they know things more clearly and directly– not as we do, which is through the tricky and limited senses.
At one point, Thomas addresses the question of whether angels can read your mind and see the future, and the answer is kinda yes but no. NO, if by read your mind and know the future you mean in the same way God does. Angels are not omniscient and do not know everything BUT compared to us, they may as well. When you guess what your friend is thinking and they say “you read my mind!”– angels are really good at guessing like that. So good it’s not even really fair to call it guessing.
They can’t see into your heart and soul like God can, but they can see what you do, and they can get a pretty good idea of what you’re probably thinking and feeling. Similar deal with the future, they can see a lot more of what’s going on right at this moment than we can from the perspective of our limited bodies, and they can take all that info and do a lot of Sherlock elementarying with it to get a decently accurate picture of the future.
So, angels can almost-but-not-quite read your mind and almost-but-not-quite see the future because they know the present and past so dang well. Huh. I wonder whaaaat could possibly go wrong with some ill-willed, fallen angels literally hell-bent on your destruction with that kind of spiritual power? Surely they wouldn’t abuse that power and play on your puny human emotions in many and various ways…
Angels are higher than us by nature, and even when they fall, (as a third of them did when they had their one chance to choose God or self/nothing/hell) the demons are still way smarter than us. They can mess with us like we use laser pointers to mess with our cats and dogs. It’s no contest- their natures are simply way higher than ours. The end. So don’t go looking for your dear late grandma via a psychic, or with a demon-magnet diabolically marketed as a children’s toy, or with freaky open-to-the-spirits meditation. Because yeah, it’s real, but it’s not what you think it is. You might think you are a master red dot hunter, but you’re not; it’s a game and you’re not one of the players, you’re the dumb dog.
Now, there are stories of saints laughing at the devil when he shows up– St. Anthony the Great and St Teresa of Avila are known for it– but they were hard core SAINTS. Obviously demons are nothing compared to their Creator (the creator of their originally-perfectly-good-selves that they freely corrupted). A saint is someone who is so close to God that they can say, like a little kid wrapped around their dad’s leg or hanging on to their mom’s skirt- “Mr. Demon you’re just a big dumb meanie and you can’t hurt me.”
Now, am I that close to God? Are any of the people who I hear talking about weird crap that they’ve seen and been a part of, most of whom claim to be vaguely Christian but tend to live out some combo of agnostic and pagan tendencies in their day to day? I don’t know, I can’t judge, BUT the saints are overtly and definitively against the evil spirits, not trying to use them for some silly earthly objective, so even if the people who mess around with creepy spirit stuff they don’t understand are very close to God, they aren’t acting like it when they mess around with creepy spirit stuff. In those moments, anyway, they aren’t clinging to God like a Teresa or Anthony, they are playing in a busy street, lucky to not get run over.
Anyway… all I’m really tying to say is
Don’t
Mess
with Demons.
aka spirits aka ghosts aka dead relatives
The only unfinished business a dead guy is going to need help with is the business of getting purified for heaven, which mean prayers toward getting them out of Purgatory, so say some of those and wait til heaven to talk to them again. St Gertrude has a sweet prayer for that.
“Eternal Father,
I offer You the most precious blood
of thy Divine Son, Jesus,
in union with the Masses said
throughout the world today,
for all the Holy Souls in Purgatory,
for sinners everywhere,
for sinners in the universal Church,
for those in my own home,
and in my family. Amen.”
Also St. Michael, professional demon-conquerer, should be your buddy:
St. Michael the Archangel,
defend us in battle.
Be our defense against the wickedness and snares of the Devil.
May God rebuke him, we humbly pray,
and do thou,
O Prince of the heavenly hosts,
by the power of God,
thrust into hell Satan,
and all the evil spirits,
who prowl about the world
seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.
That is all.
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This post brought to you by a nice warm mug of hot honey water and cream and The Violent Femmes Blister in the Sun stuck in my head.
Samwise the Gρεεκ. 