#9: Demonic Encounters
Why I still sleep with the lights on
At 16, I stood beside the elder on a gravel road built into the side of a mountain in Colorado. We were overlooking the many layers of summits and precipitous drops which stretched out around us into the distance. The clouds which covered some of the craggy peaks began to move away in the wind. Snow-capped crests gradually materialized.
We stood together silently while sunset began. Orange light reflected off the distant snow. As the sun vanished somewhere behind us, the shadowy mountains settled beneath a strip of twilight. A transparent curtain of cold misty dusk materialized from nothing. This dark blue shroud brought out enchantingly murky shades of green and white in the frosty, forested inclines. I thought I could just make out the star-like glow of a settlement several miles away.
An emerging spiritual force temptingly beckoned me to walk aimlessly into this vast mountainous wilderness. But I stayed where I was, knowing of course that I would die out there. I was already apprehensive of the creatures I might encounter in the night. Would they be similar to the demonic presences which had haunted me before?
The spirit of the Lord descended upon me as I beheld His Creation. “How is it possible,” I asked my older relative, “that people can look at this and deny the existence of God?”
They are blinded by the devil, the elder suggested.
That night, I sat in the elder’s lodgings for a while with my parents, my siblings, and my cousins. I was eager to return to my parents’ rented cabin so I could continue my studies. I feared I was falling behind in my readings. The book that awaited me was written by heretical theologians who, by positing a role for the free will of mortals, denied the absolute power of the Lord. I wanted to understand their arguments so as to better refute them. One day, when I became a theologian myself, I would be able to condemn with solemnly judgmental rhetoric informed by my bookish learning.
I could not so easily contemplate these musings here in the elder’s lodgings. My family meant well, but they were not as devoted as they should be to the Lord. They strayed often into unedifying secular topics.
Soon I excused myself so I could walk back to our cabin. I stepped out of the elder’s lodgings and into the cold night. The road leading up the side of the mountain to our cabin seemed much longer now than it had in the daytime. To my right was a slope of trees and shrubs. Above were many stars. But to my left, there was only an impenetrable blackness which erased the outlines of distant mountains.
There’s nothing out here that can hurt me, I reminded myself. God’s presence is here, especially in the beauty of the mountains, where the unmitigated power of His Creation is on display. The atheists, living as they did in big cities, simply never had to encounter the raw natural output of the Lord. They beheld the man-made buildings around them. They worshiped these instead, deluding themselves that mankind had overtaken the God of Abraham. But He would be here beside me, guiding me up this road, protecting me from the wicked creatures of the woods.
Yet I was still fearful. The loud laughter and eager chatter of the elder’s lodgings was hardly audible now. The elder’s voice, when it boomed in the now distant living room, arrived to my ears as if through a portal from the spiritual realm. I knew there were beings around me in the cold dark mountain air. The thinness of the atmosphere at high altitudes facilitates easier passage between the spiritual and physical worlds.
Ahead, I could make out a faint light from my parents’ cabin. Safety. I started walking faster to reach the warmth and security behind its doors.
Up the slope to my right, something rustled the leaves. I stopped and looked up, squinting into the darkness. The bushes and branches stopped moving. Something was looking at me. Its head was poking out from behind a tree trunk. I started walking again, this time quickly. But the sounds came again. The tall, lanky creature emerged from its hiding place and began moving parallel to me. It accelerated just as I did, maneuvering through leaves and branches while looking down at me on the road.
As I neared the dim light from my parents’ cabin, the creature’s tall humanoid outline suddenly became clear to me. Some ten feet tall, it was walking sideways on its two long legs, its thin arms dangling down to its sides, its whole body facing me, its head tilted down toward mine. But in the thick darkness of the forest, I could make out no features beyond its pitch-black shape.
My breathing intensified as I sprinted up the road. I heard the leaves whooshing and the branches snapping. I felt the momentum of this creature which pursued me. The noises from its movements grew louder, their source closing in on me.
Suddenly the branches and leaves stopped churning. Had it descended down to the road? Was it out of the trees and approaching me? I sensed the thumping of its feet. It was racing toward me across the gravel. At any moment, its hand would clasp onto my shoulder, dragging me back from the cabin. I could not get the key into the door.
I heard a skid on the gravel behind me. Rapid footsteps. My heart thumping, I finally got the door open, slamming it shut behind me. I locked it. I backed rapidly away from the entrance, ensuring I stayed in the absolute center of the cabin.
There was a glass window in the door. I struggled to catch my breath and contain my fear as I looked through it, waiting for the creature’s body to appear in the frame.
I could not keep my eyes away from any of the windows. At any moment its face would appear. Sometimes, in the corner of my vision, I caught its eyes peering over the edge of a window sill.
I paced back and forth. After some time, no further noises crept into my ears from outside. No further movements could be seen through the windows.
Shuddering, I sat down with the heretic’s book, God’s Strategy in Human History, a blasphemous argument in favor of free will. One which denied the sovereignty of God over all human behavior. I highlighted a few sentences and considered jotting some refutations of free will into the margins. How had I fallen so far behind in my readings? Reprimanding myself, I pondered the fact that I still needed to read the Puritan intellectual Jonathan Edwards’ great work, The Freedom of the Will. It was waiting for me at home back in Michigan. His was a godly argument against the freedom of mankind and in favor of God’s absolute authority.
But I could not focus on these debates any longer. Disturbingly, I could not even get excited about the great scholar Jonathan Edwards. I could only think about the humanoid outside.
I had seen these creatures before. When I was a small child, I woke up in the night and looked down the hallway. I saw the pitch-black shapes of two towering humanoid beings. They held staves and swayed back and forth, looking at me. I stood petrified near the threshold of my bedroom. They made no advance. They just stared at me.
In high school, I spent many nights reading on the Internet about these humanoids. My friend sent me websites about them. “They are called Greys,” he told me. “A particular type of alien.” He said they visited him at night sometimes. He suspected he had been abducted. Sometimes he would wake up frozen in bed. The humanoids would be there in his bedroom looking at him. I had once woken up to see one of their hands against the glass across from my bed.
The government tried to cover up their existence. But the websites he sent me showed statements from various ex-bureaucrats attesting to the Greys’ presence among us. We used to sneak out at night to search for them in the forest. Sometimes in the dark, when I went outside alone, I was certain they were standing in the nearby trees.
But then I was born again. I continued to research the humanoids, but this time on Evangelical websites. These websites informed me that what people call the “Greys” are actually demons. People do not even consider this, I read, because even religious people have begun denying the very existence of the Devil, which is exactly what the Devil wants. Yet the evidence was irrefutable that demons did indeed walk the Earth.
I found a website detailing a few of the passageways that had been found between the Earth and Hell. Some Russian guys in Siberia or something had once drilled a hole so deep that it breached the ceiling of Hell itself. Sitting in my kitchen on a laptop at two in the morning, I downloaded an audio file containing the sounds which these terrified Russians had recorded. They had done so using a heat-resistant microphone which they lowered into the chamber. I listened to the people screaming as they were tortured by devils. I soon discovered other similar recordings. These, also of people screaming in Hell, had been made during a volcanic eruption in some distant country.
Obviously, demons can easily move between Earth and Hell. Scholars have even found the bones of demon-human hybrids. Yet scientists, eager to prove their evolutionary lies, have convinced most people that these fossils were “Neanderthals.” Darwinists claimed these are the intermediaries between monkeys and men. But the Bible easily debunks the Neanderthal theory.
When man began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive. And they took as their wives any they chose…. The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown. (Genesis 6:1-4)
The Neanderthals were really these Nephilim. The “sons of God” in this passage are fallen angels, meaning demons, who came down to the Earth to have sex with human women. Their offspring, angel-human hybrids, were the powerful giants that scientists today claim to be Neanderthals. Medieval occultists apparently believed that it was these demons who taught women all the arts and crafts we have today.
The website Verse by Verse Ministry International says it is a “leading source of free, in depth Bible scholarship” which seeks to “present the study of God’s Word in its proper historical and theological context,” “to persuade the nonbeliever of the truth of the Gospel,” and “equip saints for the work of ministry.” It explains the Nephilim thus:
“Clearly, the act of mating happened, and the demons involved in this sin paid a dear price, but apart from these references, we have little to help us understand how spiritual creatures can mate with physical beings. We do not know specifically how the demons impregnated women, but we do know of other circumstances when angels appear to men in the form of bodies…. We know that the Holy Spirit impregnated Mary. While we're not suggesting that demons' abilities are equal to God's, nevertheless it demonstrates that Spirit and flesh can interact in ways we don't completely understand. So although the details are not provided for us, scripture testifies that demons and women mated in some way to produce a race of creatures called Nephalim [sic].”
But the Colorado creature I had just encountered could not have been a Nephilim, all of which died in the Flood. According to some theologians, one reason why God flooded the world was to annihilate both the Nephilim and the pleasurable yet sinful fornication between women and demons which had brought them into being.
Yet if it was not a Nephilim, it could be a demon. In that case, it would be one of the demons which other websites call “Greys.” It would be one of the malevolent creatures that so often stood in my friend’s room watching him sleep.
Could this demon have a connection with the others which had also haunted me?
Abandoning my efforts to focus on my studies of the heretics and their blasphemous ideas of free will, I thought back to one night from when I had been a very young child.
That night long ago, I was sleeping alone in a room at my grandparents’ secluded cabin in a Washington State forest. I woke up hopelessly tangled in my sheets. After a few uncomfortable jerkings, I finally sat up, grabbed the blanket, and untwisted it from around my legs. Now I just needed to straighten it out.
“Hold this,” I said. I handed one corner to the pitch-black fingers which I saw beside me. These fingers took the corner of the blanket. At first these fingers’ presence seemed natural to me, as if it were self-understood that something was here with me.
But then I froze in terror as I beheld that the blanket had not fallen when I let go. There should not be fingers there, I realized. There cannot be fingers there. Yet the blanket’s corner remained firmly in the air. It was held up by a hand attached to an arm attached to a body which was with me in my bed, breathing right beside me.
My eyes rose from the fingers to the face. This creature seemed just around a couple feet tall. It was crouched by my pillow, looking at me. Although its entire face was pitch black, it was entirely level with mine, just inches away from me, and I could see the pointed shapes of its long ears. These stuck out half a foot in both directions.
Screaming, I jumped off the bed and ran into my grandparents’ room. They let me sleep on the floor beside them. But they paid no heed to my story.
Thinking back, I wondered if the being I had just encountered in the Rockies was the grown-up version of the one that had haunted me so long ago. It seemed possible that there was a specific demonic presence which had attached itself to me.
Years later in college, I was visiting a friend in Ann Arbor. I had by then ceased to believe in God, in the Nephilim, and in demons. In fact, by that time, I was an atheist extremist who denounced God on Facebook and told my Christian grandma that I hated Jesus. I was sleeping on the floor of my friend’s bedroom, while she and her boyfriend slept in the loft above me.
I woke up to a bang against my head. I sat up quickly with a shrill gasp, sucking in air as if I had been suffocating. There it was again, the same small creature. I instantly recognized those same ears. It was standing with its legs straddling mine, its feet planted on either side of my blanket. But this time, it was crouching menacingly while leaning toward me. One hand lifted into the air behind it; another reached out toward my face. It breathed. It bent its knees as if to jump.
I kicked it in the face. This knocked it backward into a waste basket, which tipped over onto its side. Then the lights flicked on and nothing was there.
“Are you okay?” my friend asked me with a frightened whisper from up in the loft.
It must have just been a dream, I said. I am not sure how much I revealed to her.
“It sounded really scary,” she said.
I couldn’t fall back asleep in the dark. I left her room and slept on a couch in the living room with the lamp on. But even once the light of morning came streaming through the windows, I was still far too terrified to fall asleep.
I had spent the last two years zealously regretting and demolishing my former faith. I was a radical materialist now, I claimed. I only believed in things that could be experimentally verified by the scientific method. The human mind, I said, was easily deluded. Any time someone has one of these supernatural experiences, I reflected, it is too dark to see clearly, or the person is half asleep. Their brain, wired by evolution to identify dangers and threats, makes terrifying interpretations of harmless visual and auditory inputs, building photographic memories into our consciousness of things that never happened. I knew all this, but nevertheless I could not fully suppress how real the whole affair had felt. My senses would not allow me to believe that it had been a hallucination or a nightmare. I was certain this little creature was real.
Back in my own apartment, I began waking up at night, half-paralyzed in my bed. All I could do was lie there watching the bathroom door open and close, open and close, while the bathroom light switched on and off repeatedly. Something was in there, its blurry arm pushing the door open and then pulling it back. Something was in the corner, looking at me, watching me sleep. Almost every night for weeks.
I thought it was over. But then, that summer, in a hostel dormitory in Iceland, I woke up to a tall humanoid creature walking back and forth beside my bed. I couldn’t see the creature’s face or make out any features beyond the pitch-black form of the being’s body. Sometimes the figure would vanish, but the sound of its footsteps continued beside me. In terror, I struggled to act, to make a noise, to try and wake up another backpacker. I wasn’t paralyzed. I could move. Yet I did nothing but fearfully behold this sinister life form as I listened to its footsteps.
I soothed myself through it all by recalling the writings of scholarly and atheistic materialists. These men reassured me that anything I experienced which contradicted the findings of empirical science was just a hallucination created by an interaction between my silly animal brain and various cultural inputs, such as a Christian upbringing which had trained my mind to believe in demons. Anything that happened at night, or when I was sleepy, was to be immediately disregarded as a waking nightmare or misinterpretation.
“Because of your prehistoric ancestors, you are just a paranoid pattern-seeking mammal who constantly misinterprets grainy visual inputs,” explained the evolutionary psychologists. “Your ancestors had to be constantly aware of predators, so even the slightest snapping of a twig at night in the jungle would be interpreted as some kind of monster. The person who was afraid and ran was more likely to survive and pass on their genes. The person who stayed was, perhaps, eaten by a tiger or a lion. Your brain is therefore wired to use patterns to identify threats and make quick decisions which error on the side of safety.”
But what about the presence which pursued me in the daytime? Years later, on a vacation in Ecuador with my girlfriend, I repeatedly perceived a third presence. It walked with us through the streets of Cuenca and Quito. It was there in the corner of our hotel room. At times, its presence felt so natural that I forgot that it wasn’t supposed to be there. I would turn to speak to it, or turn to check if it was listening to us, but then I wouldn’t see it.
Each time I turned toward it, its invisibility jolted me. There’s only two of us here? It was not its presence which I struggled to believe, but rather its absence.
“I think there is a third presence with us,” I told my girlfriend.
She laughed. I theorized aloud that perhaps it was just a side effect of the anti-malarial medication we were taking before heading into the rainforest. “That’s possible,” she said.
But I looked it up, and it seemed like hallucinogenic side effects were not typical of the specific anti-malarial drug I was taking. I feared I was developing some kind of extreme psychiatric issue. I had heard that people start becoming schizophrenic at my age. Or, I shuddered, perhaps this third presence really is there.
A few years later, I was with friends in Denver, Colorado. There, I was engaged in the voracious consumption of recently legalized edibles. While stuffing my mouth with pizza and giving a couch a lap dance, I suddenly realized that there was a creature among us who was not supposed to be here. I stopped, looking around for it.
“There is a sixth person here,” I told one of my friends.
“No,” she said. “There are only five of us.”
I was just high, I thought. But was I not back in Colorado? Where that creature had pursued me in the mountains long ago? Had I been high then? No, but it was night, say the scientists, so it doesn’t count. I relaxed myself with these reassurances.
Until the next morning. When I wasn’t high, when I wasn’t drunk, when I wasn’t on anti-malarial drugs. I sensed the sixth person in the pure light of day. Walking with us to breakfast. The presence of this being was so self-understood to me that I did not initially wonder if it was really there. Instead, just as I had naturally handed the blanket to the creature which had appeared in my bed as a child, I turned casually to speak with it. But there was nothing there.
I struggled to accept the reality that there were only five of us.
“I still feel another presence,” I said aloud. I used a joking voice so as not to startle them into committing me to a psych ward or ending our friendship. One of them laughed and said there were only five of us, what was I talking about? Conversation quickly moved to a new topic. They seemed to think nothing of it.
But throughout the day, as I consumed as many THC-infused chocolates and gummies as I could without collapsing, I repeatedly relapsed into the conviction that this sixth presence was there with us. Each time, this perception was so powerful that I momentarily forgot it was not supposed to be there. And yet as soon as I tried to generate any details about the presence beyond the certainty of its being there with us, I was startled to realize, over and over again, that there was nothing.
A while afterward, I recounted a few of these experiences to a scientist. I told the scientist how I used to watch the bathroom door in my bedroom open and close, open and close, the light switching on and off, while a being looked at me from the corner.
I explained that sometimes, when I was falling asleep, I would hear fingers tapping against the wall beside my head.
“Jesus,” he said, “that’s extremely concerning. You could have had a brain tumor.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said sternly. “You could have died. Why didn’t you go to the doctor?”
Because I believed it was real. But I dared not say this to a devout scientist. Nor did I dare tell him that I had heard those tapping fingers as recently as the previous night.
“I just didn’t think it was a big deal,” I said.
“Well,” he said, “you need to see a doctor if it happens again.”
Instead of going to a doctor, I started reading about how to summon demons in The Black Arts by Richard Cavendish. This brought to mind one night long ago in the early 90s. I was a small child then. A friend was sleeping over. Our parents had taught us that demons were real. And they were not something to be joked about or played around with. Due to this, I wasn’t even allowed to use Ouija boards. Even the movie Jumanji was suspect, as spirit-possessed board games were, the church said, a reality.
Intrigued, my friend and I sought to summon a demon in my living room. We believed we could communicate with it by luring it into a perfect circle made from pogs. We arranged the pogs on the carpet, and then, sitting on either side of the circle, we improvised a few incantations that we thought might convince a demon to come into the room and reveal itself. I concentrated my energy until I felt the sudden sensation that there was a third, malevolent presence in the room.
At that moment, my father informed us that we were being too loud. He seemed oblivious to the purpose behind the circle of pogs we had created or the noises we were making. We put away the pogs and, as we fell asleep, I felt that we were being watched from a dark corner.
“Even if no spirit has appeared at all,” writes Richard Cavendish, “and the operation seems to have been a failure, the license [for the demon] to depart must be spoken, because the spirit may be lurking outside the circle unknown to the magician.” Reading this sent a chill down my spine. After all, that attempt at a demonic summoning had preceded all subsequent supernatural encounters.
But upon further reading of Cavendish, I learned that my friend and I had made mistakes going far beyond not commanding the demon to depart.
First, while a perfect circle and an accompanying incantation are indeed required for these ceremonies, we did not design our circle in accordance with other traditional requirements. Such circles should be nine feet in diameter, made from the points of magic knives, enchanted swords, chalk, or charcoal. Medieval magic also suggests using vermilion paint, since this contains the power of mercury and sulfur, which are associated with the powerful Philosopher’s Stone. Additionally, a triangle should be constructed outside the circle. The demon will appear there.
Secondly, the magician is supposed to stand inside the circle, which is meant to protect them from the evil spirit. We were outside the circle, and the demon would have been there with us. According to Cavendish, there is a consensus among magicians that anyone who invokes a demon without remaining inside the sacred, protective circle is playing dice with their life. Supposedly, when the famed British sorcerer Aleister Crowley (1875 - 1947) was summoning a demon with his friend in a desert in Algeria in 1909, he briefly knelt outside the protective circle. There, he was suddenly possessed. He transformed into the shape of a woman who sought to lure his friend out of the circle. Then he took the form of the demon itself. Kicking a hole in the outline of the circle which had been drawn in the sand, he attacked his friend.
Unlike Crowley, we did not target any specific demon with appropriate supplies and ingredients. Depending on the demon one is summoning, Cavendish explains that the ceremony might require dried frog heads (for demons associated with the moon), fox brains (for demons associated with Mercury), or opium and sulfur (for demons associated with Saturn). Other sorcerers, whom Cavendish also discusses, suggest using the skin of a goat which has had sex with a woman, the robe of an executioner which has been used to wipe a sword after beheading a criminal, or nails taken from the coffin of a dead child. We had just used pogs.
But despite everything we did wrong, it could have worked. Cavendish suggests that there is not necessarily only one correct incantation or procedure. The purpose of these unsettling spell components is not necessarily in their literal value (although sometimes it is, depending on the strength of their connection with the being in question). Their function is rather to concentrate the sorcerer’s energies and awaken powerful emotions. The object’s symbolism is important because it can aid the magician in concentrating her emotion toward poetically connected outcomes.
Whereas my scientist friend told me that the circumstances in which I had perceived my demons disproved their existence, sorcerers tell me that we can only correctly perceive the nature of the universe if we immerse ourselves in the very conditions which seem to disconnect us from reality. Connecting with the demonic may necessitate forgoing sleep, fasting, taking drugs, enacting sacrifice, embracing the darkness, utilizing poetic thinking rather than logical thinking, and inhaling hallucinogenic fumes during an orgy. What we perceive in these states may be more real than what we perceive when we are sober, awake, chaste, and full. Cavendish:
“Fasting and going without sleep weaken the body and give strange powers to the mind…. Drink, drugs, and sex can be used to produce a state of mingled exhaustion and exaltation in which the magician’s powers are raised to their highest pitch, but it is essential that the magician does not indulge himself for pleasure, which would distract him from the necessary iron concentration on the business in hand, but with the clear and sole purpose of building up his magical energies. The force to be evoked may show itself by taking temporary possession of the magician or one of his assistants and one of those present should be weakened to the point of exhaustion by drinks, drugs, wounds, and the ceremony itself, so that he can put up the least possible resistance to the invading force.”
The strong emotions and sensations conjured up in a ritual are pivotal components of spell casting. “In magic,” Cavendish explains, “a wave of powerful emotion is projected with calculated intent.” The force of human emotion, so long as it is properly awakened and controlled, can supposedly have effects beyond simply summoning demons. “An exceptionally gifted and powerful magician,” Cavendish recounts, “may be able to kill by the sheer force of concentrated hatred.”
In the midst of a demon-summoning sex ritual, the erudite sorceress will surround herself with various skillful attendants. Ideally, she has been fasting and chaste for several weeks. Her body is weakened; her mind is under the influence of powerful narcotics. Yet, thanks to her studies, she is also sharply aware of the specifics required for the task at hand. While she concentratedly chants her methodically crafted incantations, her attendants work her up toward a stupendous state of arousal, which climaxes at the apex of sleep deprivation, hunger, and drug-induced inebriation. If she maintains steady control over herself and does not succumb to the pleasures of the ceremony, then she can use this release of energy to enhance the power of her spell.
For maximum effect, sex magic also incorporates sacrifice. Animal sacrifice serves not to appease some divine being, but rather to make use of the adrenaline accompanying the kill. Aleister Crowley, Cavendish reports, argued that human beings were the ideal sacrifice. Not because of the literal value of their killing, but due to the rush of emotion accruing to the sorcerer making the sacrifice. Crowley himself claimed to have ritually slaughtered 150 young boys every year between 1912 and 1928.
Of course, the more ethical sorceress will simply wound either herself or an assistant with a blood-drawing gash. “If this is combined,” Cavendish reports, “with the release of sexual energy in orgasm, the effect is to heighten the magician’s frenzy and thus the supply of force in the circle still further.” But the naked orgies of witches and wizards are not merely in the service of magic-enhancing orgasms. Clothes, buttons, or fastenings might, as Cavendish reports having been told by certain witches, “impede the release of magical force which their ceremonies generate in their bodies.”
The Oxford-educated Cavendish is somewhat skeptical of the rituals he discusses. He admits these are rites which “tug at the deepest, most emotional and unreasoning levels of the mind.” By incorporating heavy amounts of narcotics, they seem designed to induce delusion. Given all this, is it so surprising that the sorceress might actually see the creature she wants to see once she is at the apex of her intoxication? Perhaps not. But does this mean it isn’t real? The question for Cavendish is one of “whether it is sensible to regard those things which we seem to perceive in ‘normal’ conditions as real, but those which we seem to perceive in ‘abnormal’ conditions as unreal.”
Perhaps it is by connecting with the most emotional and unreasoning facets of the mind that the sorceress can perceive, and control, the genuine reality of the universe, having emancipated herself from the dull confines of logical and scientific thinking.
I shall now assert that these are among the most delusional ideas possessed by human beings. Of course I do not believe in what my mind perceives when it is in a sleepy, fearful, drugged, or famished state. Naturally, I deny the efficacy of the many elaborate rituals which I have invented based on my magical studies. I emphatically reject the theory I created on how to generate the ultimate elixir. With an admittedly flimsy conviction, I insist that it is in the scientific laboratory, rather than in the perfect circle of a drug-fueled sex-magic orgy, where reality is best perceived.
But then comes the night. Fingers tap on the walls near my head. A presence is there in the room with me, looking at me from the corner, watching me while I struggle to fall asleep. I know not what it is, but I am certain it is there. Suddenly, in the darkness of my midnight solitude, my commitment to a scientific worldview fades away. I find myself even more susceptible to the occult interpretation of reality. If my calculations are correct, the small creature from so long ago is now due to visit me.
I started The Severed Branch to pursue a project of writing 50 long-form essays in 2022 on topics including history, religion, culture, literature, and travel. These are numbered, but do not need to be read in any particular order.
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Sources:
Richard Cavendish, The Black Arts
“How did fallen angels and humans produce Nephilim?” Verse by Verse Ministry International. 25 February 2014. Accessed 18 March 2022.
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