Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Good evening, everyone! Welcome back to The Lord of Spirits podcast. It is monster month. My co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young, is with me from Lafayette, Louisiana, on his hot new fiber-optic connection, and I’m Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick in Emmaus, Pennsylvania. And if you are listening to us live, you can call in, just like the Voice of Steve said, at 855-AF-RADIO; that’s 855-237-2346. Matushka Trudi will be taking your calls tonight, which we will get to in the second part of our show.

So on the Western Christian calendar, All Hallows’ Eve is approaching, and if you listened to our Halloween special from last year, you know that the Christian rituals traditionally associated with this liturgical celebration are about mocking demons and participating in the destruction of pagan worship of them. As such, people do tend to think about demons and other monsters around this time of year, and since that is part of what we address on this podcast, we’re going to take a walk this evening through a variety of monsters that you find in the Bible and in adjacent traditions: vampires, werewolves, lamia, Lilith, and, yes, unicorns. Yes, sorry, kids: unicorns are monsters.

But before we begin, just a note for parents. While we’re not going to get graphic or gruesome, some of the stuff from history in the Scriptures that we’re going to be looking at in this episode is pretty horrifying if you contemplate it. So we recommend that you listen to this one before you let younger kids listen with you. And I say that as a parent of younger kids myself.

So in the first part of this episode, we’re going to be talking about straight-up demons in the classic sense, and the first one is Lilith, which is not just the name of Fraser Crane’s wife on Cheers. So, Fr. Stephen, who or what is Lilith?

Fr. Stephen De Young: It’s a fair you go to to hear Sarah McLachlan and Fiona Apple.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Oh, man! That takes me back to my stagehand days! I worked Lilith Fair back in 1997 for its stop in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Fr. Stephen: Did you have “delicious vegan treats”?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I don’t think so. Probably not.

Fr. Stephen: Okay. So, yeah, as you mentioned—we try to make this a family-friendly show, although the priests of Baal do not cooperate in that regard at all—but, yeah, tonight, some of this stuff is kind of scary. So be advised, and send all your complaint emails to someone other than us, because we warned you.

So we’re going to be talking about the actual Lilith, after whom the fair was named. After we’re done talking about it, you’ll definitely wonder how that works, but… [Laughter] So this figure of Lilith that we’re going to be talking about has been around pretty much as long as we have written literature.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, she’s one of the oldest scary things ever.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so we’re going to be, in a minute here when we talk about her first sort of literary appearance, it’s going to be sort of one of the first written things we have. But the name, Lilith, is sort of the normal Anglicized version of the name that you typically see, and that is sort of a transliteration of what is in Hebrew Lilit, in Akkadian Lilitu, in Sumerian Lil. And sometimes you will see folks who want to connect the name, especially in Hebrew, Lilit, to the Hebrew word lila or leila, which means “night,” like “at the end of the day, night falls,” night, not like on horses. So that is not related. So as we just sort of laid out, this is a proper name that comes out of Sumerian mostly intact, at least the central syllable.

Now, this is a demon who does stuff at night, after dark, as demons are wont to do—that’s when they tend to do things—and so you’ll sometimes see things related to evening and night surrounding descriptions of Lilith, but they’re not directly related. And the reason I bring this up at all is that sometimes, even in translations, there’s sort of, as we’ve noted many times on this show, a sort of materialist bias in translations, where anything that they can interpret as not being the name of a demon, they interpret as not being the name of a demon. [Laughter] They try to translate it some other way.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and we’re going to look at some of the fun stuff in that regard, especially in looking at biblical translations, actually.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so they’ll do that with Lilith, too. They’ll try and translate it as “night” or “evening” or “darkness” or something, rather than seeing it as a proper name—but this is a proper name, going all the way back to its initial appearances. The first of those appearances is in a poem, an epic poem called “Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Netherworld.”

Fr. Andrew: Which should not be confused with the Epic of Gilgamesh, because it turns out that there’s actually a number of Gilgamesh stories that are extant. But I mean, these are hundreds and hundreds of years apart, compared to Epic of Gilgamesh.

Fr. Stephen: Right. The Epic of Gilgamesh, as we now know it today, is the Akkadian version of that epic, which was written some time—took the form we have now, between 1500 and 1000 BC, whereas the poem we’re about to talk about, “Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Netherworld,” was written during our old friend, the Ur-III period, sort of Ur-III: Tokyo Drift. [Laughter] So if you want a biblical marker… So the poem we’re about to talk about was written during Abraham’s time, and the Epic of Gilgamesh as we have it today was written more like in Moses and Joshua’s time.

Fr. Andrew: And, I mean, is this…? These are on like clay tablets with cuneiform?

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Yeah, so “Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Netherworld,” this poem we’re talking about, is in Sumerian. So we have these… There are actually five sort of epic poems about Gilgamesh that we have in Sumerian from this period, and because journal articles and dissertations have to be written, you’re going to find a lively literature about whether these five things are five separate traditions or whether the five of them together constitute an early Gilgamesh epic, and all kinds of things like that. But for our purposes, we just want to talk about this one, which is “Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Netherworld.”

And if you’re familiar with the Epic of Gilgamesh, you know that—spoilers—Enkidu dies.

Fr. Andrew: Hey, man! Don’t give spoilers! That poem’s only been around for 3500 years! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And right after that, Snape kills Dumbledore.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Ohh! I told you it was going to be scary for kids!

Fr. Stephen: So Enkidu dies, and this poem, this particular poem is not so much focused on Enkidu’s death, but focused on… So Enkidu dies and Gilgamesh sort of makes the rounds to several of the gods, the Sumerian gods, to try to get them to help him out to get his friend back out of the netherworld. So his bestest bud has died, and he wants him back. And in order to try to sort of persuade them to help him, he gets sent on these sort of side quests to go and do this or that, to try to help or impress the god in question in order to try to convince that god or goddess to help him out with the whole underworld thing.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so in some ways this sort of trope is echoed in, like, the Greek myth of Orpheus and Euridice, where Orpheus goes down to get his wife out of the underworld. I mean, you see this kind of story in a lot of mythology: the idea of rescuing someone from the underworld. And often there are things that you have to do in order to make this possible. So, yeah, it’s really common in mythology. I like the fact that you call them “side quests.” I mean, it’s true! It really is true.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, the particular side quest that Inanna, who’s also known as Ishtar, who’s a goddess, sends Gilgamesh to go do is she needs some help with her huluppu tree.

Fr. Andrew: And what is a huluppu tree?

Fr. Stephen: Well, it’s a particular tree. It’s not like a species of tree; it’s a particular tree.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, the huluppu tree.

Fr. Stephen: The huluppu tree, yeah. And so this is a tree that Inana had planted, and she had intended, once this sort of magical tree grew to sort of full size, that she was going to use the wood from it to make herself a throne and a bed.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which basically says she’s building a temple. That’s what temples have. For sacrifices, that’s what you’ve got the throne there for; and for nephilim-making, that’s what the bed’s there for.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so this is her plan, so she’s cultivated this special tree to do that, and she’s got a bunch of squatters who’ve taken up residence in said tree. And that is Anzu, who’s sort of a giant bird-creature, who’s living up in the branches of the tree; and then there’s a serpent living in the roots of the tree, down underneath, who’s burrowed in there; and there is a demon named Ki-sikil-lil-u—say that five times fast—and I said it kind of fast, but the central syllable of that—and remember, cuneiform, Sumerian and everything else that’s written in cuneiform: cuneiform has a syllabic alphabet, so each character is a syllable, so the third of the four syllables in Ki-sikil-lil-u is “lil.” So this is our first appearance of Lilith. She is this demon who is living in the trunk of the tree.

And so, because there’s these demons and monsters and creatures and stuff living in and around the tree, Inanna can’t go use it, so she sends Gilgamesh to go take care of her problem so she can use her tree. And Gilgamesh goes and he gets in a fight with and he kills the serpent that’s in the roots, and when they see that he killed the serpent, Lil and Anzu take off. They sort of say, “Cheez-it, we’re out of here!” and they take off so they don’t get killed off by Gilgamesh also. So when he goes and turns in the side quest, Inanna still doesn’t help him with the Enkidu problem.

Fr. Andrew: She sort of tricks him into taking care of her issue, which is interesting, because it kind of illustrates—it does illustrate that in pagan mythology that there are monsters that even the gods can’t handle, because… And I think this is sort of a side point, but I think it’s a really important point for us to underline every so often, which is that no god in any ancient pagan mythology even makes the claim to be all-powerful, that they can command anything and it has to obey. That is something that only the God of Israel actually says about himself. The rest, it’s sort of a world of stronger and weaker creatures that are kind of competing with each other in many cases for dominance. So even though we’ve got this goddess, Inanna-Ishtar, there’s demons in her tree and she can’t do anything about that; she needs to bring in Gilgamesh who, by the way, is a giant, to deal with it.

Fr. Stephen: Right, she can’t just cast them out, and this is part of what’s in the background when Christ comes and starts doing exorcisms, why everybody freaks out.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because no one else can do that.

Fr. Stephen: Because he can just tell a demon to split, and the demon splits, no battle required.

So this is sort of our first appearance of this demon. In later Akkadian texts, you get sort of liliths, like this is a category of female demonic spirits, and so there’s three of them that are named in Akkadian texts are Lilu, Lilitu, and Ardot- or Wardat-lili. And you can see that same syllable in all of those.

Fr. Andrew: Of the “lil.”

Fr. Stephen: The same central… that these are the same type of being. And these are related to words for the southwest wind, and so that gives… there’s this idea that this is a demonic creature that sort of flies. You could say, “Well, what else would it do?” Well, like we talked about in Genesis 4 with sin, there were Akkadian demons who sort of crawled up through cracks in the ground, so some of them crawled and slithered and that sort of thing. But this is more one that flies and sort of is associated with coming into homes through windows, the way the wind does.

And in particular, the liliths did two main bad demonic things. The first was they would enter the homes of men and sort of seduce them and mate with them and then kill and eat them.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, sort of a succubus, a cannibalistic succubus sort of thing. Or a spider.

Fr. Stephen: Or like a praying mantis or a black widow, yeah. And the other nasty demonic thing that liliths would do is they would come and, rather than breastfeeding an infant with milk, they would breastfeed an infant with poison.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. We told you guys.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. It’s not going to get prettier from here. So the way this is talked about is there’s this phrase associated with one of these lilith-spirits, that this is a woman that a man does not lay with as he lays with his wife. And that’s a way of associating what she does with non-procreative sexual activity.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so I mean the whole image that you get then is this kind of… she’s an anti-fertility demon. Oh man.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and sort of in both ways, both of those demonic things she does. And interestingly, to us nerds, this idea of the lilith-spirit, -demon, sort of traveling around and looking for men, particularly young men to do this to, there’s also—this imagery is also applied in Akkadian texts to Ishtar: the goddess we were just talking about is also one who goes around looking around and looking windows looking for young men, but she was seen as being a fertility goddess. So it sort of sets up within these Akkadian texts this idea of sort of Lilith as Ishtar’s evil twin, like sort of the other side of the coin.

Fr. Andrew: The mirror-universe Ishtar that comes in with a Van Gogh tee and a weird sash. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So this idea, this demonic spirit has a lot of staying power. So there is a similar sort of spirit in Babylonian traditions, called Lamashtu, and those two get kind of assimilated to each other, Lamashtu and Lilith.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which that often happens as these kinds of mythologies kind of clash into each other: is demons and gods and goddesses get strongly associated and then often said that they’re sort of the same thing.

Fr. Stephen: Or two hypostases of the same thing, if you’ve listened to previous episodes. But the imagery that comes into Lilith through Lamashtu that’s important is that Lamashtu is said to have the ears and teeth of a donkey.

Fr. Andrew: Like, why? That just seems kind of random.

Fr. Stephen: Teeth seems kind of odd. Are you picturing that scene in Pinocchio?

Fr. Andrew: Suddenly… Oh wow, this ruins Pinocchio for me forever.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So she had the ears… and/or would be riding on a donkey. And so one of Lilith’s titles comes to be the Donkey-rider. This is going to be important in a minute. So from there, from the Babylonian traditions, it comes over into Syrian and Aramaic traditions, and the primary place where we see Lamashtu in those is in these sort of magical texts, like some of the curse-bowls, incantation bowls we talked about last time, and on amulets and that kind of thing, because of course they’re trying to ward her off: you don’t want her around.

But so being that these are pagan Syrians and Arameans, they didn’t have sort of— It’s not like they prayed to their main god to kind of keep them safe, because as we were just talking about with “Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Underworld,” these guys are kind of all at the same power level. So the way that these Syrian and Aramaic magical texts generally approach trying to warn off Lamashtu is actually by invoking another demon who didn’t like Lamashtu. So they had this idea from their stories that this other demon, Pazuzu, who was a demon of famine and drought, and Lamashtu hated each other. And so they would invoke this one demon of famine and drought to try to ward off the demoness of sexual infertility, to try and get them to fight.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, how— I don’t know. It’s interesting. You kind of wonder if the cure is worse than the disease in some ways, because it’s both about—both of these demons are about destroying things that are at the very heart of community, whether it’s having children or feeding people. But there you go, I guess.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so— Oh, and just for the record, Pazuzu, if anybody didn’t immediately jump on that, this is the ancient Babylonian demon and Syrian demon that stars in The Exorcist.

Fr. Andrew: There you go, Exorcist fans.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, so there you go, all you William Peter Blatty fans. It is Halloween coming up, come on.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I’ve never seen that film. I was raised basically Baptist.

Fr. Stephen: I’m shocked that you haven’t seen that film.

Fr. Andrew: I know, aren’t you? [Laughter] Aren’t you shocked?

Fr. Stephen: The person for whom Dr. Who is too creepy has not seen The Exorcist? What?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It’s true!

Fr. Stephen: So this then—we talked about assimilation with Lamashtu—Lilith also ends up showing up through Lamashtu in Greek stories, and through Greek and even Latin stories. And there the Greek name, and the Latin name just transliterates it, is Lamia.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so instead of Lamashtu, you get—they kind of cut the end off and give it a Greek or Latin ending: Lamia.

Fr. Stephen: Right, because Greek actually—written Greek actually grew out of Linear B, and Linear B is a phonetic language like cuneiform languages. It has a phonetic alphabet. So with very old words, you have that same syllabic kind of thing, where you have a syllable it gets picked up with, and then based on the language development you get different endings put after it. So Lamia, in the Greek stories, in the Greek traditions, is one of the many lucky ladies whom Zeus set his eyes upon.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, again showing how their most high god is super-duper creepy, super-duper evil, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: So he went and, we’ll politely say, seduced her.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right.

Fr. Stephen: And then, after he had done this, they had some children together, and when Hera, Zeus’s wife, the goddess Hera, realized that, once again, Zeus was cheating on her and had had kids, decided to curse Lamia.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, she does that kind of… You know, if you read Greek mythology, you know that this is a thing that happens over and over again. Hera is always going after Zeus’s paramours, or his victims, frankly, is the way that we should put it. Yeah, blame the woman; thank you, Hera.

Fr. Stephen: Toxic femininity, anyone?

Fr. Andrew: Right!

Fr. Stephen: So she puts a curse on Lamia and turns her into a serpent-woman, sort of waist-down snake, waist-up human, and forced her to eat her own children and cursed her so that she could never sleep.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which kind of connects to that whole nighttime idea.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so she’s out and around at night. In the Greek stories, Zeus decided he felt a little bad after all this happened, and so the way he decided to help Lamia out was he made it possible for her to remove her eyes.

Fr. Andrew: Because that’ll help her go to sleep, I’m sure!

Fr. Stephen: So she could sleep.

Fr. Andrew: Jeez.

Fr. Stephen: Eye strain? I don’t know.

Fr. Andrew: But I thought all religions were the same, Fr. Stephen! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Paganism is beautiful and lovely. But Lamia, due to having all this befall her, proceeded to operate very much the same way that Lilith did and Lamashtu did, and that’s prowl around at night, looking for young men, mating with them, killing them, eating them.

So, all that said is background.

Fr. Andrew: And now we get to the Bible.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, all that ancient Near Eastern languages… Lilith makes an appearance in Isaiah 34:14, and you collected a cavalcade of interesting English translations for the word lilit in Hebrew.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, and we could probably double this list, but this I think gives you a sense of the scope here. Okay, so the ESV, the English Standard Version, translates it as “night bird.” The King James, which, you know, is my favorite in terms of the way that it sounds, translates it as “screech owl.” The New King James has “night creature.” Night creature! [Laughter] That sounds like it should be some kind of a TV show: “Tonight on Night Creature!” And then the RSV gets us a little bit closer and has “night hag,” so that’s pretty good.

Fr. Stephen: Now wait for it. We have to pause before this last one.

Fr. Andrew: I know! I know!

Fr. Stephen: Because this is— There’s going to be a couple “first and only"s on this episode. One of them you’re going to have to wait for the third half, but one of them you’re about to get, where this is the only time we’re going to say something positive about something ever. Here it comes.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] So there is a “Bible translation” called The Message… I’m sorry, it’s just hard to not be just a little bit sarcastic about that thing. It’s mostly… Just open it up, people; you’ll see what I mean. But, as I was doing my little survey of the way that this word gets translated in English versions, The Message has it as “the night demon, Lilith,” which is, I think, the best of any English translation I found! I couldn’t—I could not believe it!

Fr. Stephen: The proverbial stopped clock.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yes, right, exactly! I know, and it’s so fun that it’s right about this. [Laughter] How weird is that?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, not Christology or the Trinity or any of that stuff, but this they nailed.

Fr. Andrew: So, hats off to you for this one word, Message people, whoever exactly you are. Yeah, “the night demon, Lilith,” that’s what The Message translates it as. So, yeah, so Lilith shows up in Isaiah 34. What’s she doing there?

Fr. Stephen: Well, she, along with some other demonic critters, is haunting the wasteland of Edom after it’s been destroyed.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, as one does.

Fr. Stephen: So this is part of an oracle against Edom, where Isaiah is pronouncing that Edom, because of wickedness, is going to be destroyed, and it’s going to be so destroyed that all that’s going to be left of the great cities is going to be sort of rubble with sort of demons and wild animals prowling around in the ruins. So that’s the idea of why she appears here, she being one of those night demons who’s going to be out there, lingering around in the rubble.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, she’s just sort of listed. She’s not… It doesn’t really treat of her; she’s just sort of mentioned, but she is mentioned very explicitly right there in the Hebrew.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so, when we get to the old Greek, this is going to solve what may have been, for many of you—it was for me for a while—one of the great mysteries about the Orthodox Study Bible and its translation of Isaiah in particular. So in the old Greek translation of Isaiah, which is sort of the first layer of Greek translations of the Old Testament, they translated this word onokentavros, which since I just said it in modern Greek pronunciation, you may not see, but the middle part of that, if you could see it written out, is -kentaur-, like “centaur.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: And onos is a donkey.

Fr. Andrew: So, donkey-centaur.

Fr. Stephen: And so the Orthodox Study Bible faithfully translated that: “donkey-centaur.”

Fr. Andrew: So that’s a very literal…

Fr. Stephen: So, yeah, in the ruins of Edom there would be a donkey-centaur wandering around. So what was actually happening here was that you think about when the old Greek was translated—this is following the Bablyonian exile and the time the Judeans spent in Persia. Lamashtu is what? The donkey-rider. So that was the idea they were trying to convey.

Fr. Andrew: But a demonic donkey-rider, so it becomes a centaur.

Fr. Stephen: The donkey-rider: this is Lamashtu. This is what they were trying to say. And other Jewish translators understood that’s what was going on. So Aquila, when Aquila does his recension, he translates it as “Lilith,” just transliterates it into Greek.

Fr. Andrew: So these other—these later Greek translations—I say “later,” but I don’t know how much later”—are they just sort of editing the old Greek? Is that what’s going on?

Fr. Stephen: Mostly. They’re mostly trying to correct it. So they just transliterated Lilith, because he understood it as a proper name in Hebrew. And then Symmachus, who was another one of the early translators, translated it as “Lamia.” He just turned it into the Greek version of the creature, the Greek version of the demon, Lamia. And so St. Jerome, when he translated the Latin Vulgate, also went with “Lamia.”

Fr. Andrew: Fifth century AD, so some centuries after all of this.

Fr. Stephen: Right, he went with Lamia, because Latin had maintained the same name for that demon, and he—a lot of people don’t necessarily know this, but in addition to doing the actual translation, St. Jerome wrote introductions to all the books of the Bible and wrote commentaries on most of them.

Fr. Andrew: So basically St. Jerome made his own study Bible!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. [Laughter] And at this point, when he puts “Lamia,” he says that the Hebrews held Lamia to be one of the Erinyes, the Furies. So if you know a little bit about Greek myth and stories and traditions, then the Furies are these sort of demonic beings from the underworld that come and usually tear apart and drag down to Hades people who have done sort of horrible, evil deeds. So, like, you kill your father, you do some terrible deed, and the Furies come after you.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you sort of see that kind of image—I suddenly thought of that movie, Ghost, with Patrick Swayze and Demi—is it Moore?—where really bad, like murderers get dragged off by these horrifying, screeching, demonic black-black-black figures. It’s sort of that kind of thing.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, that idea manifests itself all the time in popular culture. That’s really the origin of slasher movies. Slasher movies are really Greek tragedies, because what’s going on in your classic slasher movies is that your Freddie Krueger or your Jason Voorhees or your Michael Myers or whoever, they always come after some group—usually teenagers or people in their 20s—and everyone who isn’t virtuous, everyone who isn’t established as being virtuous, all gets massacred. They sort of wreak this horrible vengeance on everyone for their sins. And there’s usually only one person who survives at the end. It’s almost always a female person, and they’re pretty much always portrayed as virginal and pure and chaste, and that’s why they survive.

Fr. Andrew: I’ll take your word for it! [Laughter] Yeah, no, I know.

Fr. Stephen: It’s this same kind of idea. The narrative is sort of serving the same kind of function that Greek tragedy used to do.

Fr. Andrew: It’s all moralistic: Be good, or else horrible things will do terrible things to you.

Fr. Stephen: Right, reinforcing this whole idea of justice and telling kids not to mess around before marriage.

Fr. Andrew: Right, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: But, yeah, so this is how St. Jerome understands Lamia, Lilith, as being that sort of demonic spirit, who sort of comes… And he doesn’t see it as goes around victimizing innocent men; he sees it as this demon is out there and God allows this demon to sort of punish sexually immoral men for their lack of chastity and faithfulness.

So this isn’t sort of the end, though. We just talked about St. Jerome, who’s obviously fifth-century Christian, but Lilith also then has this sort of afterlife in Rabbinic Jewish material. So when you get into the Talmud, for example, there’s a whole statement in one of the tractates of the Babylonian Talmud about how men should never sleep in their house alone, because if they do, Lilith might come in the window! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so this is basically Rabbinic Judaism warning against succubi.

Fr. Stephen: This can happen to you, so never sleep alone in a house, men! And there’s another tractate that says that she is the daughter of Ahriman, and—

Fr. Andrew: Right, which is kind of a weird… I don’t know, is this from Judaism in Persia, because Ahriman—

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: —is the shadow of Ahura Mazda, who’s sort of the most-high god in Zoroastrianism, or sort of.

Fr. Stephen: Well, sort of, he’s the only god…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s complicated, in Zoroastrianism, anyway.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so they were sort of connecting that. And then you get us into the stuff that gets us to the Lilith Fair, and that’s sort of late medieval Jewish legends.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the one that everyone’s probably heard of is the idea that she was Adam’s first wife, and then I guess they got a divorce, and he marries Eve later.

Fr. Stephen: Where she’s sort of this jilted or wronged woman, sort of like Lamia. And so now she’s been done wrong by a man, and she’s out for revenge, kind of idea. There’s also medieval Jewish legends where she’s one of Solomon’s wives.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s… [Laughter] I’m trying to think, like: How does that work? And maybe it’s the idea that Solomon married so many, and of course did a lot of, frankly, sinful things, that he picked up some real horrifying people by the way for his harem.

Fr. Stephen: Well, no, this is—she was one of his first wives, so there’s that jilted thing again.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, I see.

Fr. Stephen: And he goes and marries all these other women, and she’s jealous and angry and goes Glenn Close and yeah. [Laughter] But she is sort of always associated with and warned against in terms of infertile marital sexual activity; sexual activity that is not reproductive or potentially reproductive in nature is something that sort of attracts this kind of thing.

But my personal favorite—as I pointed out to you earlier—

Fr. Andrew: This is the one I kind of love, because it’s… yeah.

Fr. Stephen: In the medieval Christian West, they talk about Lilith, and she’s still in this same kind of vein that St. Jerome talked about her, but somewhere along the line, and we’re not sure exactly where, amongst her epithets she picks up the title “the devil’s grandmother.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I’m not sure how that works exactly. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I’m not either. Like, daughter or granddaughter, maybe, but I don’t get how you go up the chain. So like… And who’s the devil’s parents, then?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, I don’t know, maybe it’s feeding into this idea that she’s this super-ancient demon that even precedes the big demon. I don’t know. It’s… but fun!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, the devil’s grandma.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Okay, so that’s one of the monsters that we see in the Bible, and then in Christian tradition, later Christian tradition as well, and Jewish tradition. But then, like I said in the introduction, unicorns are monsters, too. Sorry, everybody.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Having explained the donkey-centaurs, we come now—

Frs. Andrew and Stephen: —to the unicorns.

Fr. Stephen: And unicorns are not so much in the original of the Bible as they are in the King James Version.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Aw, man!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, you’re taking a beating today.

Fr. Andrew: It’s okay. It’s all right, it’s all right.

Fr. Stephen: And you had to say nice things about The Message. That’s got to [stick] in your craw. And bad things about the King James.

Fr. Andrew: That’ll be great for party anecdotes, though. “You know the one good thing I can say about The Message?” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And I’m just going to list them real quickly—we’re not going to go through each one—but the places in the King James Version where they mention unicorns are Numbers 23:22 and 24:8, Deuteronomy 33:17, Job 39:9-10, Psalm 22:21, Psalm 29:6, Psalm 92:10, and Isaiah 34:7. And you may notice that 34:7 is not totally far removed from where Lilith shows up.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, just seven verses away.

Fr. Stephen: And there’s a reason for that… But those are the places where “unicorn” shows up. And again, we did a brief survey of some English translations…

Fr. Andrew: Yes, okay, so the King James does translate this word—whatever it is, which we’re about to tell you—as “unicorn.” The Douay-Rheims, which has a lot to recommend it in some ways, translates it as “rhinoceros.” And a lot of modern translations render it as either “wild ox” or “aurochs,” a-u-r-o-c-h-s, which… an aurochs is a kind of ancient cattle breed of sorts. It was… especially in eastern Europe and the steppes of central Asia and that kind of thing, of old, and would have been known to ancient people.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So the Hebrew word that’s behind all this is re’em, which basically refers to an urus, which is like an aurochs: it’s a sort of wild bull; it’s a type of cattle that was an ancestor of our current domesticated cattle, but was not domesticated. And so they were sort of like water buffalo or wild ox, that kind of thing. So those modern translations are kind of closer to what’s going on in the Hebrew with re’em.

The Greek translates is as monokeros, which literally means “one-horned thing.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, one-horned, and those who know a little Greek would recognize that -keros as being related to words like keratin and that kind of thing; it has to do with horns.

Fr. Stephen: And is the “-ceros” in rhinoceros, which is where the Douay-Rheims is thinking. So this gets… When St. Jerome comes to it, he’s not sure what this is talking about, and so he just changes it into Latin and put unicornus, “one-horned thing,” and then the King James translators got to it, and they didn’t know what that was, so they just transliterated it into English as “unicorn.”

Fr. Andrew: Right, so basically what we’re saying then, if I’m following this correctly, is that the word “unicorn” is the result of biblical translation.

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that the word is. Obviously, we’re talking about a concept that is behind it, but that the word “unicorn” comes from biblical translation, basically because translators weren’t entirely sure what to do with this Hebrew word.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so the trend you see, though, in all those English translations, once people start trying to figure out what it is, even the Douay-Rheims, is they’re trying to associate it with a real-world animal, sort of like we saw last time with Leviathan and Behemoth. “Well, this has to just be some zoological creature we need to associate this with.” And there’s some… I’m not going to go down this alley, but, hey, if you’ve got a lot of time on your hands and an internet connection, you can go down a whole rabbit-trail with our KJV-only friends, trying to explain what a unicorn is, because they take the King James as being authoritative and it says “unicorn,” so. This includes an argument of how it can be a narwhal on one website.

Fr. Andrew: Wow! Wow! And in case you don’t remember what a narwhal is, kids, it’s a sea-creature that in fact does have one big horn.

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: But it’s hanging around the ruins of a city?

Fr. Stephen: Apparently.

Fr. Andrew: That’s so great.

Fr. Stephen: Narwhals: swimming in the ocean, causing a commotion. [Laughter] But what’s really going on here, as we talked about last time, is this is calling upon the whole bull imagery—

Fr. Andrew: —of Behemoth, Baal—

Fr. Stephen: —Behemoth, bulls of Bashan, the bull-Baal, the Apis bulls of Egypt, the bull of heaven. That’s what this is drawing on, so this is another demonic creature. So when you put these together, like in Isaiah 34, this is an idea that is common in the Old Testament and in other ancient Jewish sources, that when a civilization collapses or a city is destroyed or collapses, and already at the time that the Old Testament is being written—we talked about the Ur-III period—there are cities that are already thousands of years old. So whole cities, whole empires, have risen and fallen by the time the Old Testament starts to be written.

Fr. Andrew: So there’s ruins around that people actually are noticing.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, of these previous civilizations. And so they believed that when those civilizations collapsed, the gods of those cities and nations and empires, the spirits of their dead kinds (who they believed were divine), all kinds of demons would make their home in those ruins: ruins, graveyards…

Fr. Andrew: Haunting.

Fr. Stephen: Ancient tombs would have these—these are the only things that would live there, would be these sort of demonic creatures and evil spirits.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which is where this association that is pretty much universal in human culture, of… Like you said, hauntings of ruins and of course cemeteries and all that kind of stuff—is that these are places of the dead, the damned, the demonic, other things that start with D… devils, demons. And then this shows up with this idea that we have now where you get this modern Egyptology where mummies haunting tombs and all that kind of stuff.

Fr. Stephen: Or, you know, Howard Carter comes and opens King Tutankhamen’s tomb and, you know, X number of people all died mysteriously from the expedition shortly thereafter because there were these sort of ancient Egyptian spirits down there in the tomb that you interacted with by going there.

Fr. Andrew: “Who disturbs my rest?” [Laughter] And, well, you know, you get a whole film genre: Indiana Jones is sort of all based on this idea. So, thanks.

Fr. Stephen: And so Isaiah, that’s why this shows up in this oracle in Isaiah is that right now, as Isaiah is making this proclamation, Edom is this prosperous civilization—they’re conducting commerce, there’s all kinds of life going on in their cities—and not only is that going to be gone, but the place where that was is going to be filled with death and evil and destruction. That’s the prophecy, is that it’s going to go the other way.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Well, that is the first half of our show. We’ve talked about Lamia/Lilith/donkey-centaurs and unicorns/rhinoceroses/bulls hanging around in the ruins of once-great civilizations. So we’re going to go ahead and go to our first break, and we’ll be right back with more monsters.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Welcome back. Well, it sounds like the Voice of Steve got a little confused there for a second, but we are back.

Fr. Stephen: I think actually you were being nice. I think he really needed some extra residuals.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’s true. How much are we sending?

Fr. Stephen: Christmas shopping is around the corner.

Fr. Andrew: That’s right. Everybody tip your local Steve. [Laughter] So we are back. This is the second half of the show, and like Steve said, you can call us at 855-AF-RADIO, and we are going to take a couple calls, but first I just wanted to give Fr. Stephen the opportunity to talk—not that he can’t—but give the opportunity to talk, because he has a brand-new book that literally just came out last week. So it’s called God is a Man of War. You can get it from store.ancientfaith.com. Fr. Stephen, what is that book all about?

Fr. Stephen: Violence and death!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s pretty much true.

Fr. Stephen: So, yeah, the subtitle is: “The Problem of Violence in the Old Testament.” So there are a lot of passages in the Old Testament—people probably have some that immediately come to mind—that as modern people are deeply troubling to us, because they don’t just depict sort of violent and horrible things—though they do—but sometimes it seems like God is kind of telling people to do those violent and awful things, or he’s okay with it at least? And so these are really troubling to a lot of people. We also have a lot of our young people who have these things thrown in their faces by schoolmates, by co-workers, etc., your local atheist, and they don’t necessarily know what to do with them themselves, so they don’t have sort of a good answer prepared. So I know some people are a little sketched out by the title, God is a Man of War, but that is a verse from the book of Exodus.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s a Bible quote.

Fr. Stephen: And so the book is about passages of the Old Testament that are troubling, and the title is a verse from the Old Testament that is troubling, so it kind of does what it says on the tin. [Laughter] And I’m hoping it will be helpful to people in that way, kind of for both people who struggle with what to do with this, like: How is this beneficial to my life to read these horrible things? and also to people who have had this stuff thrown at them and sort of don’t know what to do with it to kind of prepare you to be able to give some kind of answer to somebody who shows up and wants to throw those things at you.

Fr. Andrew: Nice. Yeah, I’m about 40 or so pages into my copy, and I’m loving it so far. So I do recommend it to everybody.

So this is the second part, and we are ready to take some calls. So we have Alexander who is calling, and this is what it says on the call board: “From Transylvania, Romania,” actually calling from Transylvania. So, Alexander, are you there?

Alexander: Hello, yes.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome. Welcome to The Lord of Spirits. We’re glad to have you. What is your comment or your question for us tonight?

Alexander: I was thinking of sharing some information about some local creatures we have here and see what you think about them.

Fr. Andrew: Sure! Sure, what’s up?

Alexander: So, for example, there is this thing called cârcolaci which I guess is kind of like a werewolf, but the thing with them is it’s seen kind of as a thing you are born with, and usually it happens if you are the third generation or more born out of wedlock. And when you are born there’s like a sign on your body so people know, and the thing is that sometimes you can turn into a dog, but you don’t know. So, for example, there are stories like a woman is attacked by a dog, and he rends her shirt, and later she meets with her husband and tells [him] what happened, but parts of her ripped shirt were in his teeth. So she knew it was him turned into a dog, and she broke up with him. So that’s one kind of creature.

And there’s also these winged spirits that lift people up in the air and after that you can become crazy or stuff. And I read about spirits that do the same thing in Japan, so it seems to be common. So that’s another thing.

And the strangest one is being called Marțolea, which you would translate as “big Tuesday,” and it’s this demon that doesn’t want… like, Tuesday is his day, so if women work on his day—or her day—she’s offended, and usually she comes as a woman and helps them to work, but harms them at the end. So, like if they are boiling cloth, she pushes them in the water, in the boiling water, or stuff like that.

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Alexander: And there’s these stories up to very recently, and people have… it’s not like long, long, long ago type of stories, like I know someone or even myself, it happened to me.

Fr. Andrew: So the first thing I’ll say is, with regards to the first two kinds of creatures you mention, we are actually… that is literally… so we’re going to be talking about, among other things, werewolves during this part of the episode, so just stay tuned for that. And then this idea of demons that make you go insane, that is in fact what we’re going to be talking about in the third part. But I wanted to mention this thing about Tuesdays, which seems so sort of random and weird, but the thing that occurs to me is—and this is the association in my head when you said this, and I don’t know but Fr. Stephen knows something else that I don’t—probably—but I do know that the idea that Tuesday is considered to be a sort of unlucky or cursed day exists in the Balkans, and I know that some Greeks, at least, connect this to the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks back in 1453 on May 29 of that year, because it happened on a Tuesday, and so there’s this idea that that’s an unlucky or a cursed day, and so you don’t want to especially start anything on that day; any new venture, that would be a bad day to start it. So, I mean, that’s what I’m kind of aware of. Fr. Stephen, are you aware of other stuff in regards to this?

Fr. Stephen: Well, yeah, as you mentioned we’re about to talk about vilkolakis and all that kind of stuff, but anyway the second two, in terms of an aerial-type spirit and sort of a demon who has claim over a day, these are things that in the ancient past—remember, we’ve talked about how there were spirits that were assigned to sort of be over and help administer for God the different elements of creation, and how many of them became demonic. So the devil himself, at one point, is called the prince and power of the air, because he was in some way associated with the air, and aerial spirits are sort of a general category.

So part of what happens as the world is Christianized is that, as we talked about, particularly in our Halloween special last year, is that these demonic spirits who had control of these things are displaced, and saints and angels sort of take their place in helping Christ administer his kingdom and his dominion. But there’s sort of this constant tension, where the “advantage” that pagans thought that they had was: You can’t manipulate Christ. There’s nothing you can offer Christ. You can’t offer him a sacrifice and get him to do what you want. Christ isn’t going to give you a love potion to make the person you like like you back. That’s not going to work, because he doesn’t need anything from you. But these sort of lesser pagan demonic spirits you can sort of try to bargain with and make deals with.

And so if—when, as paganism is displaced, and so the days of the week, like in their English names, are related to pagan gods—it’s Woden’s day and Thor’s day: these are these pagan spirits, and that was their day. There’s this tendency to say, “Well, I want to have a good day tomorrow” or “I really need X, Y, or Z” to happen, and what we’re called to do as Christians is to be diligent followers of Christ, to pray, to commit it to God, that Christ is with us no matter what happens, but if you have someone who used to be a pagan or maybe still is a pagan, whispering in your ear and saying, “Yeah, but… if you wear this amulet or use this charm or say this or write this word on a pile of leaves or whatever, well, then that’ll kind of make the spirit of that day do what you want,” or that’ll keep it at bay, if we’re talking about one of these demonic spirits: that’ll keep it away. There’s this great temptation to sort of not trust Christ, not trust God. We see the ancient Israelites do this over and over and over again. Rather than just trusting in their God and being obedient and faithful, they also want to go on the side and… “Well, I really need fertile crops, so I’m going to also sacrifice to Baal.”

And so I think that’s where a lot of these traditions and stuff come from. So the answer is not— The answer a lot of modern, materialist Christians give is: “Oh, that’s all nonsense and fairy tales. Don’t worry about that. Come on.” That’s not the correct answer. The correct answer is: There are demons who used to be associated with days of the week in the pagan past. There are demons who were aerial spirits. And if you’re not resting in Christ, then, yes, those demonic spirits can prey upon you. Christ is the protection from those spirits. And so the protection from those spirits is not to perform some kind of ritual or wear some kind of charm or paint something on a wall or do something like that; the answer is to trust in Christ and be faithful to him, because Christ is more powerful and can command the demons, not only to stay away from you, but drive them out entirely and throw them in the abyss.

Fr. Andrew: Yep. Does that help, Alexander?

Alexander: Yes, thank you very much. Can I share a fun fact before I leave?

Fr. Andrew: Sure! A fun fact!

Alexander: Yeah. I have a friend who interviewed a lot of villagers 40 years ago, and not only did they have a lot of stories about giants, but they knew where they are supposed to be buried, and tried to convince him to organize digging and stuff. And one of the villagers is actually named after a giant’s daughter.

Fr. Andrew: Amazing!

Alexander: So if people want to dig, they can come.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] All right, we’ll connect them with you. I think you’re our very first caller from Romania. So, welcome. We’re really glad to have you with us tonight.

Alexander: Thank you.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Okay, thank you, Alexander. Okay, we’re going to take one more call, and we have James calling from Washington state. James, are you there?

James: Hey there!

Fr. Andrew: Good evening. Welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast. What’s on your mind, James?

James: Thank you. Actually, I’d like to make a correction. My phone number is from Washington, but I just moved to North Dakota.

Fr. Andrew: Oh! Well, all right. Well, somewhere on the northern border anyway.

Fr. Stephen: You weren’t cold enough.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] All right. Well, welcome, James from North Dakota.

James: [Laughter] Thank you so much. As a writer and a reader and lover of stories, particularly fantasy and horror genres, I’ve observed a trend as to the nature of where certain kinds of monsters take in the stories as it’s changed over the years, and I never really thought too much of it until I started listening to Lord of Spirits and thinking about the reality of these things and wondering if there might be a deeper implication for how we started interacting with them and framing them. And the observation that I made is it’s particularly of note with witches and vampires in particular, but where in the older stories, a witch is something you became or something you did—you did witchcraft, and therefore you are a witch—or vampirism, where you became a vampire by doing vampirism, in a sense, or preyed upon and joined in with it type of thing. But in recent stories, notably of course Harry Potter and things like that, witches, wizards, sometimes vampires, werewolves, are like a species or a race or something that you’re born as: it’s not something you choose, and are therefore “morally neutral.” You can’t condemn somebody for being a witch if they were born that way is kind of the idea. And I kind of thought of it in connection, like maybe with the idea that you’re born with a particular sexuality or something, as some kind of argument, but I think there might actually be something deeper, and I’m not sure—and I might also be completely wrong. Fr. Stephen has a much wider breadth of pop-culture awareness than I do.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] And than I do, God help us.

James: But is that observation valid in the first place, but also, is there something to this shift? Do we blame it on the 19th century German philosophers, or what?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, I mean, so I’ve noticed this, too, and I think alongside it also is an attempt to humanize the… sort of the divine and the monstrous. I noticed, for instance, that a lot of monsters are now sort of tamed, domesticated, and sort of “cute,” and the example that I like to give, for instance—even though I kind of like these films, and my kids like them, and I let them watch them—How to Tame Your Dragon, where dragons are literally trainable.

James: Yes!

Fr. Andrew: I mean, and they’re fine. They’re fine. I’m not complaining against that, but it’s a thing. Or like Pete’s Dragon. I’ve noticed this, especially with dragons a lot, whereas if you look at dragons in mythology, they are not beings that you…

James: They’re much [meaner] dragons.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they are not good beings ever. They are monsters; they are just sheer demons. So I think that part of what’s going on is there’s a materialism, which is this idea that human beings don’t actually interact with kind of an unseen world; it’s all sort of inside them. But at the same time, there’s a societal desire to interact, too, like get in touch with the unseen? There’s a want for that, and so then that gets pyschologized and internalized. So, yes, some people kind of are magic is sort of the idea, like with Harry Potter, for instance. So, yeah, it’s interesting. I’m not quite sure what to make of it, but I do think that it’s part of the general kind of… this sort of contested world that is talked about, for instance, in [Charles] Taylor’s take on what he calls the secular-3 world: everything is contested, contestable; there is no dominant narrative. And I think that it’s a manifestation of that.

And it’s interesting—his is just going to give more fuel to the one guy who claims that this is the same podcast as the Amon Sûl podcast—but it’s interesting to look at the way Tolkien deals with this, where there is this notion that some people have, like, divine blood, but that doesn’t necessarily give them magical powers so much as it enables them to have the possibility of ennoblement, which the whole point is then to ennoble others is sort of the way that that goes. So I don’t know. I don’t have any conclusions to any of that, but that’s kind of my swimming around in some of what you’re talking about. Father, what do you got?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I think it all comes down to the X-men.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, right, mutants!

Fr. Stephen: And here’s why. So when Stan Lee and Jack Kirby came up with the X-men, Stan Lee used to joke that the reason he made them mutants was because he couldn’t think of any more good superhero origins, so he just said, “Well, they’re mutants.” But in actuality, what’s going on there is the mutants got their superpowers when they went through puberty. So this was to connect with young readers—who were the audience for comics at the time, not people in their 40s like me—and to kind of say… When you’re a kid and you’re going through puberty, all of a sudden, your body gets weird and gross and you don’t know what’s happening to you and you feel like an outcast and a weirdo, right? And so that was sort of the idea behind it.

But then, as it goes on, as the X-men comics went on, all of a sudden that became a metaphor for race in the late ‘60s, and then it became a metaphor for sexuality in the ‘90s, and then on and on. And so it’s this kind of trope—and this is why you see it so concentrated in teen literature now, like Twilight or Harry Potter or whatever—that you have a group of people who feel weird and picked-on and gross and that kind of thing, and appealing to them is the idea that, hey, that thing that makes you weird and everybody picks on you about is actually, like, your superpower; that’s what makes you special and great.

And so this isn’t just sort of apologizing for it, because I think there are some problematic things there, where, when you tell people, “What’s important about you is how you’re different from everyone else…” So, like: “Your rebellion is the core of your personhood; the ways in which you have rebelled against societal structures, that’s what makes you unique as an individual and special. So if you don’t have that, if you’re sort of normal, that’s bad.”

James: It’s a whole wide genre! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, like it’s bad to be a Muggle. It’s bad to just, you know, live a quiet and decent life in godliness and sanctity, as St. Paul says we should try to. You need to be different [from] everybody else, and unique, and question everything. And that creates a certain idea of what identity is, where identity, again, is what makes you different from everybody else, whereas earlier and more ancient concepts of identity was your identity was sort of a series of overlapping circles of where you fit, not where you didn’t. So my identity is made up of being my wife’s husband and my parents’ child, and the community I’m a part of, and the parish I’m a part of—all of those roles and all those capacities, you pile those all up and you get my identity. My identity is not the way in which I reject all those.

So I think that’s at the core of what’s going on, and I think it’s super destructive to society, to start to view your own identity that way.

Fr. Andrew: Oh yeah. So does that…?

James: So now it becomes: how to write a story that subverts those tropes?

Fr. Andrew: Well, see J.R.R. Tolkien, I don’t know. [Laughter] You know, it’s true. A lot of the things, for instance, that our friend Jonathan Pageau talks about is about reestablishing hierarchy in a healthy way, and that’s exactly this: it’s exactly putting things in their proper order. So, yeah, I mean, it can be done and I think people do connect to it when it’s done really, really well. If you think about it—just think about the… It’s interesting, for instance: just look at the Marvel cinematic universe, which plays with both of these ideas. On the one hand, there is: these people are weird and that’s what makes them who they are, but then on the other hand, okay, there’s problems in the world and we need to fix them and need to put things back; we need to have peace again and this kind of thing. So it’s constantly dealing with this problem of order versus chaos and how you navigate that. Yeah, so. All right, well, thank you very much for calling, James. We’re glad to have you on and help us, let us nerd out a little bit. I mean, the whole thing is nerding out, but this is a pop-culture nerding out! [Laughter] Thanks!

Okay, so now that we’ve talked about just outright demons, now we’re going to talk about human beings that are kind of functioning in demonic ways. With the first, we’re going to talk about werewolves, one of everyone’s favorite Halloween monsters: werewolves, right? Alexander brought up werewolves a little bit from Romania, but, yeah, I mean, werewolves—this is another one of those beasts that’s everywhere; like, everyone has a werewolf. It’s in pretty much every culture in mythology.

Fr. Stephen: And you can do your Old English etymology here.

Fr. Andrew: Yes!

Fr. Stephen: I know you’re chomping at the bit.

Fr. Andrew: I am. I am! It’s a good Old English word. We-re is one of the many words from Old English that means “man,” in other words a human; and then “wolf” is “wolf”! It’s spelled with a U in Old English typically, but “werewolf” is just man-wolf actually. That’s all it is. So, yeah, that’s where we get “werewolf.” It’s a good, good, classic Old English word.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and it’s sort of a transliteration of the Greek lycanthrope. Anthropos is “man,” except that’s wolf-man instead of man-wolf.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, what do they call that, a calque, c-a-l-q-u-e? Where you translated each of the parts and come up with a new word like that. Lycanthrope, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: So you have the classic television program Manimal, but that was a whole other thing.

Fr. Andrew: Man! [Laughter] Okay, so let’s go to ancient Greece, Fr. Stephen, because that’s where werewolves come from, at least the earliest ones we know about, at any rate.

Fr. Stephen: And ancient, ancient Greece…

Fr. Andrew: Yes! Super ancient, like Titanic almost Greece.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, we’re talking about Arcadia.

Fr. Andrew: Ur-Greece, as it were.

Fr. Stephen: Ur-Hellenos, yeah. Arcadia is an area in Greece, a mountainous area in Greece still, but it was in the ancient world considered to be the beginning: this is where Greek civilization began, and this was sort of the golden age back in the past. I’d be remiss if I didn’t here give a shout-out to Arcadian Knights, the greatest WoW Guild in the history of Dragonblight US server.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Sorry.

Fr. Stephen: But anyway, in Arcadia, the first king there, sort of in this Greek pre-history, was a fellow named Pelasgius, and that “s,” part that Pelas- part is important. Pelasgius, not Pelagius.

Fr. Andrew: But spelled basically the same, except with an “s” in there.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Now if you want to scare the dickens out of your local Calvinist on Sunday, dress like Pelagius! But this is Pelasgius.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I’m trying to imagine what a Pelagius costume would even look like! I don’t know.

Fr. Stephen: I don’t know. You’d have to look like you were working really hard to earn your salvation.

Fr. Andrew: Scottish toga… I remember there was an insult I think it was St. Jerome hurls at Pelagius, where he basically says that he eats too much haggis, if I remember correctly.

Fr. Stephen: Well, he was British.

Fr. Andrew: Right! Well, I mean, it was definitely on the table.

Fr. Stephen: Well, there you go: carry some haggis, and yeah. Yeah, this is Pelasgius.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Only people who eat a lot of haggis could think that they could save themselves by their own merits.

Fr. Stephen: If you can manage to eat a large quantity of haggis, you are capable of many things. But anyway, so this first king, Pelasgius, the Arcadians are later also known as Pelasgians, and that’s named after Pelasgius.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because he’s sort of the founder of their society or whatever.

Fr. Stephen: Right. That’s like a G sound in there: Pelasgius. It’s not like Dr. Pulaski of the second season of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Fr. Andrew: And second season only, yes. They’re not Polish.

Fr. Stephen: More well known that Pulaski is, other than the fact that he lends his name to the people, in some accounts, is his son, Lykaion. And not only is his son named Lykaion, Mount Lykaion is a mountain in that region. That mountain has two peaks, and it is the southern peak which now concerns us of the two. And what’s on that southern peak of Mt. Lykaion is the oldest known altar to Zeus, not just known to us today, but when you read ancient Greek sources, they say, “This is the first altar to Zeus.” That altar was so ancient and so sort of renowned in Greek religion that it had its own name. They referred to that altar as the Bemos. And that is important in showing you the age of this tradition, because Bemos is derived from bima or bema in Semitic dialects, going back to Akkadian, which is the word for “altar.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and we use this even in Orthodox Christian liturgics to refer to a particular location in the temple as well, the bema, in the middle of it, typically.

Fr. Stephen: But this was not the regular word for altar. This was just called the Bemos. And we mentioned this before on the show, but this is one of the reasons why Greek is the last Ancient Near Eastern civilization, not the first Western one, is because, when you get down to the ur-layer of all of these particularly religious words in Greek, they’re derived from Akkadian. They’re coming from further east, not further west. And so what the Bemos actually is, regardless of what you may be thinking of when you think of an ancient altar, it was actually a big mound of ash from centuries of sacrifices, and then a retaining wall around it, to mark out sort of the sacred precinct around the altar itself.

And the story was that anyone who walked into that sort of sacred precinct, who went inside the retaining wall inappropriately—sort of without permission or without the blessing to do it, who wasn’t a priest—would be dead within a year, for having trespassed. And the reason they said that the altar was there in particular is that they believed that that peak was the birthplace of Zeus Lykaios, sort of the localized hypostasis of Zeus from that place. The Zeus who was worshiped there was actually born there, and that’s the reason for the altar.

So this ancient site is there. Here’s where things get ugly again. Repeat the parental advisory. So in the story of King Lykaion, he goes to this place and sacrifices a human infant who was an enslaved person, the child of an enslaved group whom he had conquered, and offered the infant as a sacrifice to Zeus, including eating some of the entrails.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because, just as a reminder, everybody, human sacrifice doesn’t just involve killing humans; it involves eating humans.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, cannibalism, in the form of blood-drinking and in the form of cannibalism, direct cannibalism.

Fr. Andrew: Eating piece… right.

Fr. Stephen: And so when he did this horrible thing, he was transformed into this sort of cannibalistic wild wolf-creature.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so there’s kind of a… And here’s a question I have, and it’s a genuine question, like the chicken-egg issue. Is the Greek word for “wolf” derived from this guy’s name, Lykaion, or his name “Wolfy”? What’s going on here?

Fr. Stephen: It probably goes the other way.

Fr. Andrew: That “wolf” is derived from his name?

Fr. Stephen: No, that he’s being named “Wolfy.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that he’s being named “Wolfy,” okay.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and this is “Wolf Mountain.”

Fr. Andrew: Right, and we’ve— I don’t know if we’ve mentioned this on this show in the past, but I’ll just say it now. Sacrifice puts you in communion with your god, and sometimes big super sacrifices are done kind of to have big effects. So to sacrifice a human is done in an attempt to— I don’t know, have a really super intense communion with your god and gain powers, like it’s considered a very big, powerful, powerful sacrifice, to sacrifice a human being versus just an animal or a grain or a drink or something like that, which is sort of the usual sacrifice. Like, this is unusual even for paganism, that you would sacrifice a person, because in the ancient world you get pagans who don’t do that looking down on and sometimes attacking and destroying other pagan tribes who did it, looking at them as sort of way beyond the pale, like: “That’s just so wicked. Nobody should do that.” But the idea is that it’s this monstrous thing to do in order to get monstrous results.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and it’s interesting. You see this migrate in the telling of the story, too. The earliest Greek tellings of this story, it’s kind of portrayed as this kind of powerful, ur-magic thing. I need to stop using “ur-.” I’ve used it too much tonight. [Laughter] But when you get to the later stuff, especially when you get to Ovid talking about it; when you get to—the Romans had a particular aversion to most—repeat “most”—forms of human sacrifice—see the Punic Wars. So they saw him getting turned into a wolf as more of a punishment from Zeus.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, like a curse from the gods. That’s the version I think you usually see, if people are reading this story at all, which… it’s not in most collections of Greek mythology that are out there, but most of the ones you see, it’s this idea that he did this wicked thing, so he was cursed by the gods to be like a wolf. But like you said, in earlier ones, it’s like he was gifted by the gods: he gained wolf-powers.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and even the later Greeks got super embarrassed by this stuff, and they did some revisionism about it.

Fr. Andrew: As one does.

Fr. Stephen: As one would be a little embarrassed. But not only do you have this cultic activity going on, but related cultic activity—we don’t usually think of it, as modern people, as cultic activity, but there were also Lykaian games that were held in the valley at the foot of Mt. Lykaion.

Fr. Andrew: Like Olympic games, but they’re cannibalistic werewolf games.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, they weren’t at Mount Olympus. And it’s worth noting: we don’t think of the Olympics as cultic activity today.

Fr. Andrew: No.

Fr. Stephen: But they were. Games were, in the ancient world. Many of the earliest games, especially the Greek games, did not have spectators. People didn’t go to watch them as sporting events. They went out and they performed these things, and they were performing for the gods in their mind. So this was a weird sort of offering, of their prowess and beauty and strength, to try to gain credit with the gods, try to impress them.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s this whole notion of doing quests to get stuff for the gods.

Fr. Stephen: Raise your rep, yeah. But so the most famous champion of these games was the first champion, a fellow named Damarchus of Parrhasia, and the way he won the games was, before the games, he went up to the altar and offered an infant and ate part of it and got the wolf powers. And then the wolfen transformation allowed him the additional strength and prowess and everything to be this great victor in the games and be crowned as the victor.

So, much later in the second century BC, there’s a fellow named Pausanias who was a geographer, who traveled around Greece and was sort of the Anthony Bourdain of the ancient world. He went around and talked about the food and the culture and the geography and the way of life…

Fr. Andrew: ...the human sacrifice…

Fr. Stephen: Right, yeah, and religion and all these things in these various places. And he tells us in the second century BC—so this isn’t that long before Christ; this is maybe 150 years before the birth of Christ—that these infant sacrifices were a regular occurrence there. This wasn’t just this crazy thing that happened in the distant past, but this is something that—I mean, not every day, but every few years, this is a thing that happened.

And there’s a related story, connected to this, that’s told by Pliny the Elder, who says that they chose a man by lot every ten years, and this person who was chosen by lot would sort of go into this sacred forest and become this wolf-creature. And he would spend nine years roaming in the wilderness as this kind of wolfen creature, and if he didn’t eat any human flesh during that nine years, then in the tenth year he would be restored to his humanity, but if he did, he would remain in that state permanently. And so when Caesar Augustus comes to power, he’s putting together—he has Vergil put together the Aeneid, the new history of the world that culminates in Augustus; he also had Ovid travel the world and collect sort of all the folklore and the stories so he could form them all into one sort of master epic, again, leading up to Caesar Augustus. And Ovid includes in this Roman material both Pausanias and Pliny’s accounts, forging them together, of this werewolfism thing.

And so this is this well-known phenomenon in the ancient world, about what happens with cannibalism particularly, and this kind of human sacrifice, and the spirits associated with it, such that St. Augustine talks about it in City of God, XVIII.17, and he recounts the same story that Pliny the Elder did, but he also talks about those who, in lupum fuisse mutatem, those who are changed into wolves, they’re transformed into wolves, and says that this is a particular type of sorcery or witchcraft, pagan ritual, that people participate in to do this, to have this effect, that there are demonic spirits related to this, and that by participating in these rituals, one takes on this sort of monstrous, animalistic, cannibalistic aspect.

Then, going on from St. Augustine, in the Latin West, there’s this text called the Canon Episcopi, or the Capitulum Episcopi, and this was believed for a long time in the medieval period to have been canons issued by the Council of Ancyra.

Fr. Andrew: Right, but wasn’t actually.

Fr. Stephen: But was not actually, but because they thought that they were, these canons entered into Western canon law—so they are still to this day, they’re in there in Western canon law—and includes this condemnation of what we would call werewolfism, of rituals to cause yourself to be possessed by these animalistic, cannibal spirits.

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Stephen: And because it’s then in Western canon law, when you get to the Inquisition, the Inquisition has records of executing, in various countries, a handful of werewolves, of people who had participated in these kind of rituals, had become demon-possessed like this, and then who were executed for cannibalistic activities. And this becomes, in French, the loup-garou which, for those of us in southern Louisiana, is the origin for the rougarou, its Cajun cousin, who roams the bayous. And you can see how this starts to participate in some of the stuff we said about Lilith, because, like when you get to the rougarou, this is something to scare kids with: it’s this demonic being who’s prowling around that’s going to get you if you don’t behave, this kind of Fury idea that we talked about. And then you get Hispanic traditions, the Cucuy, and some of these things that are also sort of similarly related.

But now’s your chance, Fr. Andrew, to talk about some Indo-European paganism!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, right, I mean, so, as a lot of people probably know, I’ve been reading a lot of Germanic literature lately, both Norse pagan and of course then Beowulf, which is Christian literature, and this idea of werewolfism is there all over the place, and it’s often associated with warfare particularly, like you would do something to become like a wolf or, occasionally, like a bear before you go into battle. In some of these stories, you see them—people actually being transformed into wolves, and, interestingly enough, there’s a Germanic word like the word for wolf, which is “wolf,” is also used to refer to outlaws in general, so this idea that outlaws are participating in this tradition on some level. And what’s interesting if you read some of these Norse stories particularly, like some of the Sigurd legends and stuff—and I noticed this when I was reading this in some of the classes I’ve been taking lately—that a lot of times, right before they become “wolves,” there’s references to eating and drinking human blood and this kind of thing. So like this connection between cannibalism and werewolfism—it stretches from one end of the world to the other.

So, yeah, it’s crazy, crazy stuff, but there’s a whole series of these werewolf legends. It’s an interesting question… Like you brought up, there’s Native American stuff, too, but, like underneath it, are we talking…? There’s the modern notion of werewolves that we see in these movies, Twilight and all this kind of stuff, and then Teen Wolf, hello, that’s about getting power so you can be really good at sports, hello!? [Laughter] Hi, ancient Greece! Sorry, Michael J. Fox.

Fr. Stephen: You heard it here first: Michael J. Fox is a nephilim. You heard it here first. [Laughter] The shortest one ever, but still.

Fr. Andrew: Right!? Because they’re not necessarily tall, everybody. But, yeah, what’s underneath it? I mean, do we believe that if you go into communion with demons in weird ways like this, you can gain supernatural abilities? Yes! I mean, it’s attested throughout history.

Fr. Stephen: And in the Bible.

Fr. Andrew: And in the Bible.

Fr. Stephen: The demon-possessed man, who throws off the people who try to chain him, and breaks chains.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Okay, so mention the Native American stuff, because that’s on the other side of the oceans, now.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and it’s worth reiterating, especially in the Indo-European form, this is especially related to initiation rituals.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, becoming… Like crossing into manhood, crossing into soldierhood, becoming a king—this stuff is connected to all of that.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and so what that means is, as we talked about with the giant clans, what makes the giant clans giant clans is this ritual life and participation in it. So what we’re talking about here with werewolfism is really a subspecies of giantism, if you want to use that term.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s about communion with demons in order to sort of gain powers.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So the Native American version of this—this is actually across a wide swatch of Native American groups, but the one that’s been studied the most by sort of folklorists is the Ojibwe, and that’s where these spirits are known as the wendigo. And here’s where I make a “ravenous” joke, that you won’t get, but some listener will, somewhere.

Fr. Andrew: It’s okay.

Fr. Stephen: And a “hungry like a wolf” joke, so it can get added to the playlist.

But so the idea here, in popular culture, when they do horror movies and stuff with wendigo, it’s usually some kind of hairy beast-man kind of creature, but that’s white settlers assimilating the wendigo stuff with werewolf stuff from Europe. And we’re not saying it’s unrelated, but when you look at sort of the original Ojibwe wendigo stuff, this is actually a spirit, a demonic spirit, which is a giant—they describe it as being this giant spirit—that appears as sort of a withered, emaciated human. And when I say “withered and emaciated,” I mean, they describe it as a skeleton with some skin hanging off of it, that is sort of ice-cold, giant, skeleton thing. But this spirit comes and possesses people who are greedy or who are gluttonous or who engage in cannibalism, and regardless of why it possesses you, it then causes you to engage in cannibalism.

And so there’s these initiation rituals involving cannibalism from ancient times among North American tribes as well. So this is one of those sort of universal—just like giants are universal, this sort of sub-species of giant, that’s associated with this kind of gluttony and greedy, the devouring of flesh, both metaphorically and literally, and these rituals involving the sacrifice of humans and eating of flesh and blood is sort of this across-the-board thing of demonic activity.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Okay, so we’ve talked about werewolves, and now we’re going to… As you’ll see everybody, the line between that and what we’re about to talk about is actually kind of narrow at points. But in popular imagination, there’s another thing called a vampire. And most people think of the whole Bram Stoker thing and Dracula—who, by the way, is a Romanian folk-hero—but, weirdly enough, vampires are a thing in, wow, a lot of cultures. So what’s the deal with vampires?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it’s also not a feat people living in New Orleans or people who sparkle in the sunlight… [Laughter] So basically, at its root, to sort of boil it down and bottom-line it, what we’re categorizing here as under the category “vampire” is a demon-possessed corpse, a dead human body that has been possessed by a demonic spirit, as opposed to a living person who has been possessed by a demonic spirit.

And so what you find in this phenomena is people who have died in some sort of cursed state. So whether this is in paganism, they were under some kind of curse or had done some kind of horrible evil in life that had brought a curse upon them, or, once Christianity comes into the picture, this is people who died excommunicated, were buried in unhallowed ground, this kind of thing, that then opens up the possibility of this demonic possession. And there’s also, because, as Fr. Andrew just said, the line between what we’re categorizing for sake of this episode as “vampire” and what we’re categorizing as “werewolf” is pretty thin, there’s cannibalism and blood-drinking involved with this, too. And, in fact, sometimes you find this view; sometimes the people who come back as some kind of vampiric thing are people who were sort of demon-possessed werewolf-types in their life, and then they die and continue this sort of demonic existence.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and there’s… In a lot of ways vampires are closely related to imagery having to do with zombies: a demon-possessed corpse coming back that wants to eat humans on some level. Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: And this is also… I mean, the stream of everything we talked about—demonic Liliths in the first half—all flows into this, too. So you have this thing called a strix, which is striga in Latin or strigx with sort of a g and an x the way it’s usually transliterated from Greek, which was a night-demon who eats flesh and drinks blood, particularly preys on infants; from that word is derived strigoi in Romania and in the Balkans in general. The first person in history whom we have who was sort of publically labled and written about as being strigoi was a fellow I’m assuming this pronunciation; my Croatian is rusty, shall we say, but it looks to me like Jure Grando Alilović, who lived in Croatia in the mid-17th century, in the year 1672, 16 years after he died, he showed up in Istria, where he came from, and came back! And was this demon-possessed being that attacked people in the area until he was decapitated by the village priest. And numerous people wrote about this at the time. This guy was the talk of Europe at the time, and much reported on.

And so we mentioned the Balkans. When you get into Greek discussions of these creatures, they’re referred to as vyrkolakas.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which is not the proprietor of your local Euro stand. It’s… So I looked this up so I could see where the stresses were: vrykolakas, mentioned by a number of modern Orthodox saints. Surprise, surprise, everybody. So St. Cosmas Aitolos, who’s 18th century, he said this; this is a direction quote:

When we hear the word “devil,” it is he who was once the first among angels; it is he who moves people to pride, to murder, to theft; it is he who enters into a dead person, causing him to appear living, and we call him a vrykolakas.

So St. Cosmas enters into a dead person, causing him to appear living, and that’s called a vrykolakas, which often gets translated as “vampire,” but it’s sort of like partway between… Again vampire and werewolf and zombie. Okay, so here’s another one, so much, much more—even more modern saint, St. Paisios the Athonite, who just died in the 1990s. So this is from the Life of St. Paisios by his disciple, Elder Isaac, who writes this:

The elder related: “I knew an old woman who was very stingy. Her daughter was very good, and whatever she wanted to give as alms, she would throw out the window so she could leave the house with empty hands, because her mother would always check to see if she was taking anything. But if she told her mother that the monk (that is, me) had asked for something, then her mother would be willing to give it up.

After her death, I saw a young man (her guardian angel), and he said to me, ‘Come, So-and-so wants you.’ I couldn’t understand what happened to me, but we were standing in front of a grave in Konitsa. He moved his hand like this, and the grave opened. Inside I saw a grimy mess and the old woman who had started to decay. She was calling out, ‘Monk, save me!’ My heart went out to her. Feeling sorry for her, I climbed down inside, and without being repulsed, I embraced her and asked, ‘What’s wrong?’ She said, ‘Tell me, didn’t I always give you anything you asked willingly?’ ‘Yes, I said,’ that’s true. ‘All right,’ said the young man, soothing her. He moved his hand like this again and closed the grave like a curtain, and I was back in my cell.

The sisters from Sourotia asked me [by the way, I’ll just say Sourotia is a town where the monastery that he founded and where he finished out his life was, and that’s where he’s buried, by the way, too.] So the sisters from Sourotia asked me, ‘What happened to you on the feastday of St. Andrew?’ I answered, ‘Pray for So-and-so’s soul.’

Two months later I saw her again, high above an abyss. There was a plateau with places, a lot of houses and many people. The old woman was up there; she was very happy, with the face of a small child, that had just a tiny spot that her angel was also scrubbing to clean off. In the abyss in a distance, I saw people being beaten and harassed and trying to climb up. I embraced her out of joy. I took her aside a little so the people in the abyss wouldn’t see us and be hurt. She said to me, ‘Come on; let me show you the place where the Lord has put me.’ ”

So in this, St. Paisios is brought to the grave of this old woman who was mostly evil in life, very stingy, and then he sees her as this sort of animated corpse, decaying and so forth, and then, through his prayers, she’s brought to paradise on the feast of St. Andrew—hey! The feast of St. Andrew. So that’s a couple of modern saints that refer to things like what we’re talking about. We’re going to talk a little bit more about modern Greece and this, but there’s a couple of other things that we wanted to mention that are connected with this.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So this is something that goes way back again, back to the Neolithic period. We have found in Neolithic burial sites—and it’s only certain burials within a burial site—there will be certain burials where the remains were weighted down or pinned inside the grave with heavy things like rocks and things; some were nailed down. And, again, this isn’t every grave in the site were that way; this is particular graves in the site, and only those particular ones. And very common in the ancient world are to find—again, just some of them—buried sort of facing down, the idea being that if they came back they would—since they’re facing down, they would go down into the underworld, down into Sheol, rather than coming back up to where living people were. Those are sort of the pagan, ancient pagan ways of handling it.

But you see this being seen as a possibility right away in the Byzantine period, because we start finding certain—and again, it’s only certain—Byzantine burial sites where there are these wax crosses that had what the—what looks like in English an ICXC, which is actually sigma…

Fr. Andrew: Iesus Christos.

Fr. Stephen: And then Nika—“Jesus Christ conquers”—on a wax cross that was put on a body as a sort of a seal to protect it from demons.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, sort of sigil or sign against demonic influence.

Fr. Stephen: Sort of the symbol of Christ’s victory over the demons, that would prevent the demons from disturbing the remains or attempting to use the remains. But the clearest thing—

Fr. Andrew: Oh boy! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: —that Fr. Andrew’s going to get to read—

Fr. Andrew: I’m so excited about this; you have no idea.

Fr. Stephen: You didn’t see this coming, did you, when you started talking about this?

Fr. Andrew: I did not, when you sent this to me. This is great. This is amazing.

Fr. Stephen: So in 1867, this little book called the Nomocanon was issued to all of the Orthodox priests in Greece, and it had… It’s sort of like a Small Book of Needs, kind of? It had canonical rules for how to do certain things and procedures for handling certain things canonically. And there’s a section, which Fr. Andrew is about to read, which is called, “Concerning those who burn vrykolakas.”

Fr. Andrew: Okay. So this is what it says:

Those who have burned vrykolakas and were coated in their smoke should not receive Communion for at least six years. Vrykolakas are submissive instruments of the devil who appear at night, wandering to and fro, harming, destroying, and predicting the future. These are those who are many days or even many years dead, and return among the living as one who is young, with flesh and bones. Thus, when these people hurried to burn the dead, having exhumed them and having seen the vrykolakas filled with blood, having long hair and long nails, they should have known that his accursed relics would be resurrected again on the day of judgment when he would stand before the dread and impartial Judge. Then he would be sent to the outermost eternal fire, damned for eternity, unless he truly repents of his impiety.

When this kind of satanic demon is identified, the priests should have been called to perform a supplicatory canon to the Theotokos and a blessing of the waters. Then they would serve a Divine Liturgy and ask the help of the Panagia for all of the people, and also celebrate a memorial service with kolyva, chant the exorcisms of the baptismal service and the exorcism prayers of St. Basil the Great, and sprinkle the entire community with holy water, pouring the remaining holy water on the vrykolakas. By God’s grace, the demon will flee.

So before we discuss this, I just want to point out that even if you were to say that, for instance, when St. Cosmas was talking about this phenomenon, that he was just sort of passing on some kind of tradition he knew about, or that St. Paisios was just having a vision—I mean, you could explain what they said in those terms—this is a book of instructions to priests telling them what to do, number one, if someone was going around burning the bodies of these people, and, number two, what should be done instead of this kind of vampire hunter thing that was going on. So, I mean, this is very… These are solemn instructions. These are liturgical instructions. This is not “book of crazy things that priests should know about”; this is… Yeah, like I said, these are liturgical instructions; this is part of a manual.

So it’s very clear, and it’s not just like: “Do exorcisms or whatever,” but it even includes this definition of what this is, that these are human corpses that are inhabited by demonic presence and that come out of their graves and do bad things. So, okay… Yeah! [Laughter] Wow. Okay, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: And it’s important how this is phrased, too. Once you get past the initial like, “Wha-at!?”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right. I’m still kind of there, but I’ve read this ten times now. Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] So, right. How is this phrased: “Concerning those who burn vrykolakas.” So the problem from the perspective of this text—the problem is that there are people going around burning these bodies.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, digging them up and burning them.

Fr. Stephen: That’s the problem that this is set out to address. So, taken for granted is the idea that there are these people who, through living an evil way of life, have ended up becoming these monstrous things, these monstrous dead things. You didn’t end up this way accidentally. They’ve become these monstrous things, and these monsters are menacing the community. And the problem, from the perspective of this text, then, is that in many of these communities, the response to it is for these people to go and identify the person who has become this monster and destroy them.

That’s the problem, because what should happen, according to this text, is what? That the community—the community that’s being menaced by this monster, by this formerly human monster—needs to gather together, and they need to pray to God for the soul of this person, to try to drive out the demon and redeem this person, which they can’t do if someone has burned them.

And so burning one of these gets you six years’ excommunication. That’s like murder. This is seen as like murdering that person’s soul by this text. And so that, to me, is the key thing here: is that you don’t go and try to destroy the monster that’s menacing your community; your community gathers together to repent on behalf of that person, because they’re dead and they can’t repent any more. And to seek that formerly human monster’s salvation somehow.

Fr. Andrew: All right, well, with that we are now going to go to our next break, and we’ll be right back with the third half of the show.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back, everyone. We’re going to take a couple of calls, but first I wanted to just mention something that I think a lot of you out there are going to be into. So, you know, we’ve made reference a number of times on this show to our friend Jonathan Pageau’s work on the symbolic world. So I wanted to mention a new project that he’s got coming out that I think is going to especially appeal to you Lord of Spirits listeners. It’s a graphic novel called God’s Dog.

Now, this isn’t an ad, but it’s just something that’s really relevant that I think you guys are going to like. He actually sent me a draft of the piece, and I read through it. It’s really cool, actually. Cool art, interesting writing… It’s a fantastic and kind of imaginative weaving-together of stories and figures from Christian tradition including, yep, the nephilim, St. George, St. Symeon the Stylite, and, of course, St. Christopher, and, of course, very relevant to tonight’s episode.

So anyway, Jonathan has a crowdfunder that’s going up in just a few days. You can learn about God’s Dog and sign up for updates at godsdog.com, so it’s godsdog.com. The crowdfunder starts up on October 31, but you can—like I said, you can sign up for updates.

All right, well, we do have some callers waiting on the line, and first is Jules. So, Jules, you’ve been waiting very patiently for a while, so welcome to Lord of Spirits podcast.

Jules: Thank you, Father.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, man. It’s this guy!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wow! Okay, I guess you know each other.

Jules: Well, I thought for the sake of professionalism, we were going to pretend like we didn’t know each other, but all right.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, no. No. I’m about to roast you in front of, like, 12,000 people.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. This is exciting!

Jules: So I was going to say something nice… I was going to say after the last bit, I just became even more pre-modern than I usually would.

Fr. Stephen: That’s good.

Jules: But I do have an actual question.

Fr. Stephen: Okay.

Jules: So you guys are talking about, with respect to vampires, a possessed dead body. But I noticed there’s a lot of myths and stories where you’ll see an innocent passerby who gets abducted in the night or walks in the wrong side of the woods, and they get abducted and turned into some kind of monster. And I think the example I wanted to go with was there’s the vampire myth of Sava Savanović—I think I’ve mentioned this to Fr. Stephen a couple of times, but… I’m not going to say the whole myth, because that’s going to take forever, but there’s basically a woman who marries this young man, and they live in the mill, and the vampire used to live in the mill. And the woman’s sleeping one night, and the moth—there’s like a moth that is the vampire that just enters into her mouth, and then that’s all it takes to just turn her into a vampire herself. And so I’m kind of curious about that sort of thing, where you have the sort of innocent people who didn’t really live these… at least it’s not described as them living these sinful lives, but these monsters still get ahold of them and turn them into something demonic. What’s going on there?

Fr. Andrew: Father? Since this is the guy you’re going to embarrass in front of 13,000 people. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: I thought there was one place where I wouldn’t have to answer his questions, and even that’s not safe any more. [Laughter] No…

Fr. Andrew: I assume he’s local to you. I get that…

Fr. Stephen: He is, yes.

Fr. Andrew: All right. So this is love, then. That’s good.

Fr. Stephen: He is my prodigal spiritual son, in fact. [Laughter] But so, yeah, part of this is related to the answer we gave to a caller in the last half, when you probably weren’t paying attention.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wow!

Fr. Stephen: No, where there’s this tendency—this is another place where paganism kind of tries to creep back in. Sometimes… I mean, the way you’ve described the myth, I think it’s this. Sometimes it’s like: Well, you need to conduct yourself in a certain way—and this is more like St. Jerome’s idea with the lamia—you need to conduct yourself in a morally pure way in your life in order to be safe from these things, or something bad might befall you. But, more often than not, we get into the mode that paganism is creeping back in and saying, “Well, you need to do X, Y, Z”—eat a lot of garlic or do these, what are usually ancient pagan practices and charms and that kind of thing—“in order to protect yourself from these demonic spirits and demonic creatures, because otherwise, even if you’re an innocent person, you may fall victim to them.”

And that ends up becoming a sort of more subtle temptation in its own right, in that it’s tempting you to put your trust in those kinds of—what’s really a form of techne, a form of know-how—even though it’s magical know-how—to try to protect yourself and control the world around you and your environment rather than trusting in Christ and remaining faithful to him and having that as sort of your protection. And so the particular casting of a lot of those stories is where some of those old pagan things try to creep back in. And while it’s subtle in a story like that… I mean, there were unsubtle forms of this in the ancient world, like when the Western half of the Roman Empire was collapsing, there was a huge move by the pagans saying, “This was because you converted to Christianity. We need to go back to the pagan gods, and then they’ll save the Western Roman Empire.” This isn’t that sort of gross and unsubtle; it’s a more subtle way for those same pagan rituals and traditions and things to kind of try and creep back in under the radar and distract people from Christ and faithfulness more subtly.

Fr. Andrew: Does that make sense?

Jules: Ah, yes, it does. Thank you, Fathers.

Fr. Andrew: All right, thank you very much for calling, Jules. I think you got off pretty well. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I went easy. It’s in public. I went easy.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] All right, okay, we’re going to take one more call, and that is Sarah. So, Sarah, are you there?

Sarah: Yes, I am here! My question is pretty basic. It’s just wondering where in this discussion we put legends like Bigfoot, the Yeti, the Abominable Snowman, just these giant beast-creatures. Are they just another offshoot of the werewolf tradition, or are they kind of their own unique thing?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! I mean, to me… It’s interesting that they’re often depicted as giants, that they’re physically large. But, yeah, I mean, to me it seems like it’s a merging of that: of giant stuff along with werewolf stuff, that they’re sort of halfway between either wolves or bears and people. This actually gives me the opportunity to mention one thing. We sometimes refer to pagan stories as being demonic propaganda, and they kind of are, but there’s also a layer of just human beings interacting with this stuff in ways that then it gets recorded in a particular way. And so, in this case, what I would say that the understanding is that there’s these phenomena that these people are aware of, but then the way that these stories get told manifests themselves as these creatures like this, that there’s this beast-man that’s out in the wilderness who’s ready to maybe eat people and do violence in some way or another like that. So that’s my take on it. So, Father, I don’t know: do you have any “Um, actually"s or expansions or whatever on any of that stuff?

Fr. Stephen: Well, with Sasquatch and Yeti in particular, what tends to get left out—and leaving this out helps assimilate it to more of a werewolf-type thing—is that—you especially see this with the Yeti, but you see this with some of the Native American stuff regarding Sasquatch also—is that the Yeti is actually sort of the wise man of the wilderness; that these weren’t sort of seen as bestial creatures, but they’re seen as these sort of ancient creatures that had this kind of ancient wisdom about them; that they were in touch with something maybe that humans weren’t, or they occupied this kind of weird, semi-divine ground, even though they’re kind of bestial at the same time. And so, yeah, I think that’s an important element that sometimes gets left out, because you see a horror movie with a Sasquatch or, on the other end, you see Harry and the Hendersons.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Oh man!

Fr. Stephen: And we tend to think of them as creatures or as some kind of ape or some kind of cave man or that kind of thing, but the more ancient stories about them is always you would go see the Yeti in Tibet because it had some kind of… in some cases even antediluvian kind of wisdom about it, that it might be able to impart to you. It’s sort of like… more like Houmbaba, if you’re familiar with the Epic of Gilgamesh at all, in the cedar forests of Lebanon, who’s sort of this creature favored by the gods. There’s a little more to that element to it, I think, that is missing from some of the werewolf[-kin]. They’re not clearly human in the way like werewolfism is a human who’s entered into this kind of relationship with a spirit.

Fr. Andrew: Does that make sense to you, Sarah?

Sarah: Yes, that does make sense. And is there time for a quick follow-up question?

Fr. Andrew: Sure.

Fr. Stephen: Is it about El Chupacabra?

Sarah: [Laughter] No, it’s more about the werewolves, going back—why…? Is there a reason why the wolf-form gets harped on, like it’s not like a were-beast; it seems to be this theme of wolf, specifically. Or is purely some linguistical thing?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, you do see some bear stuff mixed in there in the Indo-European, but the wolf, across the board, is by far the most predominant. That may be related to dogs, which of course are related species, being one of the earliest domesticated animals. I’m partially conjecturing here.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, well, and also, human interaction with wolves, legendarily, especially, are not good, especially human beings traveling in the wilderness and that kind of thing. And wolves, especially when they go in packs, can be particularly dangerous. But then there’s also, at the same time, especially wolves in North America, for instance, can act in a very solitary way. But they’re huge! I mean, if you’ve ever seen a wolf in person, they’re big, big animals, and very scary. So even though they, in sort of their natural biological state, often will avoid people and are therefore not that dangerous, people who encounter them are rightly kind of scared because of how big and scary they can be. But, yeah, it’s really just this prototypical sense of violent, bestial presence amongst human beings.

It’s not that people who gain this sort of demonic ability become wolves; it’s that human beings understand what’s happening to them as being in a wolfish way, if that makes sense. Like, this is the way that it gets talked about. It’s not that they become that animal in reality. Because a human being cannot take on the nature of a wolf.

Fr. Stephen: Right, it’s a predatory thing. It’s about predation. And bears aren’t predators the way a wolf is.

Fr. Andrew: Right, that’s true. How does that work for you, Sarah?

Sarah: Yeah, no, that was perfect. That was very helpful. Thank you.

Fr. Andrew: Great! All right. Thank you very much. I said that Sarah was going to be the last call we were going to take, but we actually have a deacon calling in who has an urgent question about the Nomocanon having to do with vrykolakas.

Fr. Stephen: Is he facing this situation as we speak!?

Fr. Andrew: I don’t know! [Laughter] But we’re going to let him in under the wire before we talk about demon possession, so how about that! All right, so, Deacon, are you there?

Deacon: I am here, hello!

Fr. Andrew: All right, welcome. So, okay, what’s your deal, Deacon?

Deacon: So my original… Well, some people know I’m a vampire scholar myself, and I was originally going to call your canons, but you guys covered the question I was going to ask, so I had something different, and it might be related to what you’re going to talk about.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Lay it on us!

Deacon: I did a lecture once on heresy and exorcisms and vampires, and this thought that most of the time when these vampires appeared, they weren’t necessarily seen; they were just found in the graves, incorrupt. So do you think that the demons might have chosen that form, of an incorrupt body, because holy people were usually incorrupt? It’s like with the saints.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s a kind of parody of holiness. I mean, that makes sense to me. I don’t know, Father; what do you [have] on that?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I think there’s that element and, if you’ve read all this stuff, then you probably already know this, but part of what happens, then, once the demon is sort of dispelled, is that the body decomposes normally. And that’s connected to, of course, our bodies’—ashes to ashes, dust to dust—our bodies’ return to the earth from which they were formed. And so there’s an element there also of sort of what is natural not being allowed to take its course, that there’s this unnatural thing, that this demonic spirit is sort of rebelling against the natural order that God has set up for our life in this world, where we are mortal. But again, it’s not actual resurrection or actual continued life; it’s just this parody of it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s false life.

Deacon: Usually it was just a misunderstanding of medicine. They didn’t… People didn’t know how bodies decomposed back then. They viewed everything as something supernatural, whereas all bodies bloat and leak, and things like that.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but sometimes… Sometimes it is.

Deacons: Yeah, sometimes it’s giants.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It’s not always giants, but sometimes it is giants. All right, well, thank you very much for your call.

Okay. Well, this is the final half of the show tonight. We’ve gone on for a while, but we wanted to talk a little bit about demon possession about King Solomon’s magic ring. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Thing Ring, do your thing!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wow.

Fr. Stephen: I’m digging in the crates with the references tonight.

Fr. Andrew: One ring to rule… No, sorry.

Fr. Stephen: Too obvious. Way too obvious.

Fr. Andrew: Too obvious, but, I mean, super applicable in this particular case, as everyone will see in just a second. So, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: We’ve talked about demon possession at several points along the way on the show. We talked about how that was seen in the ancient world, in many cases in a positive light. I mean, we talked about in werewolves, that werewolfism was even seen in sort of a positive light very early on in a lot of pagan contexts. But we gave the example before of Socrates who had this demon that whispered wisdom to his soul, and that was part of his defense! [Laughter] “I’m getting this from a demon, guys!”

Fr. Andrew: “Oh, okay. Let him go, then.” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so I mean, this was seen in a very different way. And we see that reflected, as we mentioned before, in the book of Acts, when there’s the slave girl who is possessed by the demonic spirit who tells fortunes—we saw one of the things that the vrykolakas does is predict the future—is possessed by this demonic spirit, and St. Paul casts out the demonic spirit, and then the owners get mad at him. The owners of the slave girl get mad at him, because they say, “How dare you? This is how we made our money.” And even some modern Episcopalians think that was a horrible thing to do to her, because that’s what made her unique and special, to go back to that point, was being demon-possessed.

Fr. Andrew: Yes. You’re not making that up.

Fr. Stephen: So this isn’t a case where Christianity comes along and starts talking about people being demon-possessed. There’s this phenomenon of people being possessed by spirits. And Christianity comes along— Well, Second Temple Judaism and then Christianity comes along with a different interpretation of that same phenomenon. And we’ve talked about that before, but that was just sort of a quick review, but sort of a related element of this now, that we see play out in a lot of stories about saints, has one of its points of origin at least in a text called the Testament of Solomon.

Fr. Andrew: And we should probably say, right out at the outset: we’re not saying this is some kind of canonical scriptural text—

Fr. Stephen: No.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] —we’re not saying that anyone should regard this as anything but a really interesting text about some weird stuff…

Fr. Stephen: Yes, this is definitely… This is… We’ve talked before about how—I’m sure we’ve talked before on this podcast, about how in the East there were three categories of books, that there were books to be read in the churches, which is what we would call canonical; there are books to be read in the home; and then there are books that are not to be read, because they’re heretical.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and this is kind of on the… It’s sort of on the edge of “things you can read at home” kind of text!

Fr. Stephen: Yes. So that’s what I was going to say. So some of the texts we talk about on this show, like 4 Ezra or the first book of Enoch and those kind of things are sort of on the borderline of what’s read in the church and what’s in the home, because some churches view them as canonical and some don’t, so kind of on that borderline. The Testament of Solomon that we’re about to talk about is sort of on the borderline of “read in the home” and “not read at all.” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Fr. Stephen: It’s not a recommendation.

Fr. Andrew: We should take this as a really interesting story that reflects certain motifs that we find…

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, there’s a motif. We’re going to run through this book quickly to highlight a single motif within the book, and then talk about how that motif plays out within the Orthodox tradition. We are not saying that this text is in any way a part of the Orthodox tradition. 83 disclaimers now finished.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] So delete that angry email you were working on, folks.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. So this text also has— Just last Sunday we read—once again: we read it a lot, but this time we read it from St. Luke’s gospel—the story of Legion, running around in the tombs. So demon-possessed man is where? He’s out in a graveyard; he’s out in the ruins. That’s where the demons are. This text is the other place where Legion shows up. So we’ll get to that in a minute.

The Testament of Solomon is a text that is probably—again: journal articles, dissertations, so we argue about it, but pretty much everybody agrees that this is late first century, early second century “Christian” text, and by “Christian” it just means this person is aware of Christianity; it’s not saying this person is Christian in any kind of apostolic sense—and we’ll get to why here in a minute.

So what this is doing is it’s taking the story of Solomon from the Old Testament, and then interpolating with it a lot of Greek and Jewish magic, like literal magic traditions and superstitions and that kind of thing. So there’s a lot of pagan stuff in here is the short way of saying that. So in this book, at the beginning of the book, this angel shows up and gives Solomon this magic ring with a pentagram on it. Already, I know: we’re not endorsing this. And what this ring allows Solomon to do is enslave demons.

Fr. Andrew: As one does. It is the one ring to rule them all!

Fr. Stephen: Yes, he can use this ring to enslave demons. And so he enslaves a couple of demons. He ends up enslaving Beelzebul, who’s Baal, who’s the devil, who’s the prince of demons.

Fr. Andrew: Lord of the flies.

Fr. Stephen: Well, no, this is Beelzebul. This is the original title, not the “making fun of him” version.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, excuse me. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: But because now he’s got like the demon boss, so now he’s kind of got all of them now that are on the payroll that are working for him.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Subcontractors, as it were!

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. Okay.

Fr. Stephen: So Solomon now… Most of the text of the book is then Solomon sort of having chit-chats with all of these different demons. And these demons are mostly less than impressive. These are kind of the Bob Larson demons, if you’ve ever watched him exorcise demons from middle-class housewives, as is his wont.

Fr. Andrew: The demon of sore throats, the demon of dizziness spells, the demon of…

Fr. Stephen: There’s literally a demon of sore throats, whom he talks to, and he would then ask them, “Hey, what do we do to ward you off, demon of sore throats?” And the demon of sore throats is like: “You write this Greek word on a leaf, and then you put it in a pile of leaves, and then I won’t be able to come and give you a sore throat.” So that’s the level of this text. Not super worthwhile. So it’s a lot of folk remedies and magic and this kind of thing.

So there’s a couple other interesting little bits. So he catches Legion in a bag out in the desert. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: As one does.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And he explains what the whole “My name is Legion” thing means, because it says he’s got a bunch of other demons, who are like his boys, whom he brings with him everyplace.

Fr. Andrew: So it’s like a Roman army unit is what he’s… yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And he’s described as being lion-shaped, which is presumably because of the lion banners that the Roman legions used.

And then there’s this bit. This is why they say whoever wrote this or whoever edited it at some point had some knowledge of Christianity, is because Solomon asked Legion, “Well, who’s the angel who wards you off?” his usual thing. And Legion says, “Oh, there’s no angel that can ward me off. Only one who will come and will suffer many things”—obviously talking about Christ. So he’s obviously sort of “predicting” the story that we read in St. Luke’s gospel. So whoever it was was familiar with Christianity, even though he was into all this other wonky stuff, folk remedies.

And so Solomon uses some of these enslaved demons to build the Temple for him, because you’ve got to lift all these heavy stones and stuff, and so there’s sort of an Ancient Aliens element to this, where they’re like: “Who could have possibly built that? It must have been demons!”

Fr. Andrew: “I’m not saying it was aliens… but it was demons.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and he at one point… He’s trying to get one of the pillars for the Temple, and for some reason it’s at the bottom of the Red Sea—it’s not quite explained—so when he pulls it out of the Red Sea, magically, he also releases this ancient Egyptian demon that was trapped down there at the bottom of the Red Sea, who was the one who gave the magicians in Egypt their powers and who got stuck there when Pharaoh and his armies got drowned. So Solomon sort of enslaves him, too, and makes him install the pillar.

But so anyway… And I’m making light of all this on purpose because it’s weird and goofy and not to be taken super seriously. But at the end, Solomon meets a woman—to come full circle, back to Lilith being his wife—meets this woman and really wants to lie with her. The text is kind of explicit on this point. It’s not like he fell in love with her; he wants to lie with her.

Fr. Andrew: It’s just lust, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, makes her one of his wives, and then, because of sort of his lust, he loses all of his demon-controlling powers. So the end of the book is sort of this cautionary tale, like the end of Johnny Cash’s “Delia’s Gone,” where he sort of turns to the camera and breaks the fourth wall and says, “Hey, don’t do what I did and let your lust make you lose your demon-controlling powers.”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wow.

Fr. Stephen: So again, we’re not endorsing or recommending really this text, but—but—this is the first incidence we have of this motif of a holy person, because of their personal holiness, being able to command or control demons.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I found recently this icon of St. John of Novgorod, who was a 12th-century Russian bishop, and the icon is of him riding what looks like a pegasus, a winged horse, except you look closely at it: it’s a serpentine winged horse: it has claws and a pointy dragon tail. And it turns out that the story goes: while he was praying, that this demon wouldn’t leave him alone, and so he turned around, and then he forced the demon to become this winged horse thing to take him on a day trip pilgrimage to Jerusalem and back to where he was in Novgorod. So I guess it’s one of those kind of things where it’s like: “Stop it, demon! Well, okay, you’re working for me now, for at least a little while.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, and there are stories of a monk who forced a demon to sing one of the hymns of paradise. The whole thing we talked about last year with St. Nicholas enslaving Krampus or Zwarte Piet or—

Fr. Andrew: Belsnickel!

Fr. Stephen: All of these kind of things. And with Solomon in this, remember, it’s while he’s sort of holy, he has this ability; as soon as he becomes lustful and gives into sin, he loses it. So this is because of personal holiness. And this is really—ultimately, this whole motif is flowing out of what we see back in Genesis 4, when Cain is angry at his brother and God comes to him and says, “Sin is crouching at your door, like this demon. It wants to master you; you must master it.”

And so what we’re seeing in the lives of these saints, what this is about is not about, like: hey, you can make demons do tricks; it’s about the fact that, because of their holiness and their way of life and having drawn close to Christ and being conformed to the image of Christ, they now have mastery over the power of darkness, rather than the powers of darkness having mastery over them. So this is the inversion of demonic possession.

Fr. Andrew: Possessing demons rather than being possessed by them.

Fr. Stephen: Right.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. Right. Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting that this whole episode is kind of about giants on some level, too, even though, again, it’s not about tall people. It’s not about tall people, everybody.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, because when the demons master you, you become less human and more like a beast, more like a monster. And when you become like Christ, you don’t just become like God—you do become like God, because Christ is God—but you also become more human, because Christ is both where we see who God is and where we see what a human person is.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. And, you know, there was one thing… When I was trying to connect with some of the research for this episode, one of the things I ran across was this legendary account about Cain getting killed. I mean, because the biblical text does not mention Cain’s actual death, but it does mention Lamech who was his descendant either bragging about that he has killed people, or apparently in some readings of the text it’s that he’s saying he’s super prone to violence, like he’s boasting that he’s ready to kill people including, like, a boy—but either way, there’s this legend of Lamech hunting out in the woods, along with his son, Tubal-cain, and that they see a rustling in the bushes, and it looks like an animal, so Lamech shoots him with an arrow, and it turns out that it’s Cain. And the reason why they didn’t realize it was Cain was because he looked bestial, that he looked like a beast.

So there’s this theme of human beings becoming bestial as they get demonized, as they become sinful. So it’s interesting just how fractally this kind of plays out across cultures, across legends, across time, across geography. It’s crazy.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so, to reiterate and sum up: When we talk about giants as giants, or any of the things we talked about tonight, giants are at the far end of that spectrum. It’s not just tall people; it’s not people who were born tall; it’s not a genetic thing. It is people who have, through the conduct of their life, through the rituals they have participated in, through the worship and relationships and fellowship they’ve formed with demons, become demonized to the extreme. They are at the far other extreme from the saints, who have become like Christ. They represent the far negative end of human possibility, of what it is to cease being human, to become inhuman, to become a monster, as opposed to becoming more human and being formed in the likeness of Christ.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Okay, well, we’re going to give our final thoughts. So, I mean, I think the bit that really hit me the most in this episode was the thing about the vrykolakas, Greek vampire/zombie/werewolves. And the reason why it hit me is not because, like, monster stuff is cool or whatever, or, wow, look at those backwards mid-19th-century Greeks who believe in this stuff; but rather that, number one, it’s taking very seriously this reality of the interaction of the spiritual with the material, the immaterial with the material. It takes it very, very seriously. I mean, this is from a manual for priests; this is not a book of legends or whatever.

But also the thing about it that really struck me— And this is where I think it comes home for all of us, because, again, the point of everything that we do on this podcast is actually to make our spiritual lives better, to be better at this thing called Christianity. Because, number one, first it condemns people who… their approach to human beings who are monstrous is to burn their bodies, literally dig them up and burn them. And it condemns that. It says, “Don’t do that. In fact, people who do that should be treated like murderers,” that they’re excommunicated for years.

And then it says what should have been done or what should be done is that there needs to be this cleansing done, with holy water, with prayers of exorcism, with the Divine Liturgy—notice the Divine Liturgy being used to fight against demons—with praying for that person’s soul with kolyva so there’s the memorial prayers that are prayed for them, and this is because this is a person who has died and so he doesn’t have possession of his mortal body any more, so he can’t repent. And so the Church engages in acts of repentance on his behalf in hopes that God will grant mercy to him.

And so on the one hand, this is a pretty clear model, based on uncontestable Orthodox tradition about how to deal with demonic presence and how to pray for people who are departed, especially those who are departed and lived very sinful lives. But on the other hand, we can also analogize this even to our day-to-day life. So there’s a big temptation in our time, especially in our time, to look at people who are not just… okay, so people we disagree with, but let’s just go ahead and say people we regard as super evil—now, in many cases they’re not, or they’re just people we disagree with, but let’s just go ahead and say these people who are super evil.

People who are super evil: what are we supposed to do with such people? The way that the world wants us to deal with them right now is to burn them, whether metaphorically or whatever. That’s what the world says: destroy them; they must be destroyed. These are evil, subversive, horrible, destructive people; they must be destroyed. Whereas this instruction, this Nomocanon, says that the way you’re supposed to deal with people who, again, admitting that they are monstrous, understanding that they are monstrous, is actually through spiritual acts of mercy, that that’s the way to deal with them, to try to get the demon to go out.

Because even if someone really has descended into evil, it’s because there’s a demonic presence there. That’s what’s going on. A human being who is acting in a truly evil manner is a slave. They’ve enslaved themselves; okay, it’s not like they’re not culpable, but they’re a slave, and what we want is to free them from slavery. And so that’s the approach.

Now, a lot of the time, like I said, people are not actually evil. We disagree with them, and we’re letting our passions take over, and we’re seeing them as monsters even though they aren’t. But even if they really are, what does Christ say to do with our enemies? Love them. He says to love our enemies. That’s what he says to do. It’s very, very clear. We’re not called to burn them and to destroy them and so forth. We’re called to love them.

So, I mean, that is an amazing take-away for me, in a really unlooked-for place, frankly. I mean, despite being really interested in some of this kind of stuff, I have not ever wondered to myself, “Wow, I wonder if there’s a canonical approach to what you’re supposed to do with vampire-hunters and vampires,” but, sure enough, there is, but it’s not just about vampires and vampire-hunters. It simply illustrates foundational, clear principles of what it means to live the good Christian life, what it means to actually be like Christ, to do—to follow his commandments, to obey him, and to live as he told us to live. Fr. Stephen?

Fr. Stephen: So, dove-tailing nicely off of that, sort of the whole theme of Lord of Spirits, the overarching thing, as the Voice of Steve says in the intro, is about trying to reunite our experience of reality, the spiritual and the material, together, that have been… where they’ve been pulled apart. And one of the places where they’ve been pulled apart, and one of the places where I think we least realize they’ve been pulled apart, is in our understanding of our behavior, of “morality.” We have, in addition to separating all the things we’ve talked about on the show separating, we separate sort of religious acts from other acts… So probably most of our listeners, and even probably people who aren’t listeners, would say that, “Well, yeah, if you go and participate in a pagan ritual or some kind of ritual of some other religion, some idolatrous ritual, if you eat meat sacrificed to idols, that, yeah, that would be participating in some kind of demonic activity, yeah.”

But when it comes to sort of our day-to-day decisions about whether or not to lie, whether or not to cheat, whether or not to take something, whether or not to show mercy, whether or not to forgive, we tend to treat those in this sort of other way, this sort of material way of morality, where, as Christians at least, most people would say, “Oh, there’s these rules. God has these rules, and if you follow these rules, then you’re a good, moral person; if you break those rules, you’re a bad person.” But this is a question of God’s judgment of your behavior: there’s nothing particularly demonic or angelic or spiritual about it.

Hopefully, as I said that, at least our Orthodox listeners were saying: Well, wait a minute. We have an understanding of theosis. We have an understanding that when we “do good” in a positive sense, we’re not really doing good things independently, but we’re participating in the work that God is doing in the world. We’re participating in God’s activity in the world, and that’s why it’s transformative of us. It isn’t this sort of separate thing that God kind of judges from afar, but we’re actually working. And the reason God can call any work we do “good” is because it’s actually his work that he’s doing through us, that it’s not coming from us ourselves.

But this has a coordinate on the other side, that that means when we sin, when we do evil, it’s not just that we broke a rule, but that we are participating in something demonic, because the truth is: everything we do is on a continuum. When we come and celebrate the Eucharist together as a parish family and when you gather around with your immediate family at the dinner table and pray and eat a meal together, those are not two different things. Those are two things that are on a continuum. The Eucharist, obviously, is at the very top: at the very top of the continuum. But the fellowship that you share and the bread you break with friends is on that continuum. It is doing, to a lesser degree, in a smaller way, what the Eucharist is doing to the Nth degree. And so when you give a cup of water to someone in need, it’s not that “oh, well, rationally, this person’s in the image of Christ, and the rule is I should treat other people as I would treat Christ.” Doing that is on the same continuum as serving Christ. Everything we do, and vice-versa.

I think there are very few people listening—I hope there’s no one listening to this who has ever seriously contemplated sacrificing an infant to a pagan god in order to receive powers. I hope there’s nobody who’s even given that a moment’s thought. But every time we participate in evil, every time we ignore it, every time we excuse it, every time we participate in it, every time we do it ourselves, we are performing actions that are on a continuum with that horror. We are on a continuum with that kind of nightmare.

And you see this even in what we talked about tonight. Werewolfism doesn’t start with that; werewolfism ends with that. Werewolfism starts with being greedy and gluttonous, with always wanting more, with being ravenous, with wanting to devour, and devouring other people metaphorically, a long time before you get to literally. But those aren’t two different things; those are on a continuum. Those are on a continuum.

And so we need to take every choice we make and how we live and what we do and what we pursue very seriously. There isn’t neutral. There isn’t: well, I didn’t do anything all that significant either way. All of these things are on one continuum or the other. All of these things are leading us closer to Christ and becoming more human and more like God, or they’re leading us in the opposite direction, to become less human and more bestial and more of a monster.

As you pointed out, it’s never too late. Even if you’re dead—even if you’re a demon-possessed corpse, the Church presents that there is hope for you in Christ. But we need to reconsider the value of our everyday morality and actions and the kind or unkind words we share with people, even those smallest things, because everything starts small and then gets bigger. And every footstep we take leads us down one road or the other.

Fr. Andrew: Well, thank you very much for that. Well, that is our show for today. Thank you very much, everyone, for listening. If you didn’t get a chance to call in during the live broadcast, we’d love to hear from you either via email at lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com; you can message us also at our Lord of Spirits podcast Facebook page. We read everything, but we can’t respond to everything, and we do save some of it for possible use in future episodes.

Fr. Stephen: Join us for our live broadcasts on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 7:00 p.m. Eastern, 4:00 p.m. Pacific.

Fr. Andrew: And if you are on Facebook, you can like our page, join our discussion group, leave reviews and ratings everywhere, but, most importantly, share this show with a friend whom you know is going to love it, and don’t forget to buy our books, please. Thank you!

Fr. Stephen: And if you enjoyed hearing me uninterrupted this evening, that’s thanks to Ancient Faith paying for my new internet connection. If you really appreciate it, go throw them a few shekels to keep it going

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It’s at ancientfaith.com/support. Thank you very much, everyone. Good night, and God bless you and be with you always.