Field Notes Part 1

A Taxonomical Guide to the Spirit World.

Introduction

Most people can’t spot Satan.

I mean, they can I guess, but only if he’s being comically evil. The average Joe might recognize The Rwandan Genocide as satanic maybe, or perhaps the rape of a child…

But anything more subtle than that?

Totally goes over his head.

All my life I’ve felt like I’m watching people sleepwalk into traps. Destroying their lives, their relationships, their bodies… all by giving in to what seem to me obvious and avoidable temptations. I mean, I’m not claiming to be a saint or Mr. Perfect or anything, but God… it just seems like a lot of people are living life with blinders on.

I don’t suppose they can help it.

Since at least the turn of the last century most people have been formally taught that things like demons, witches, and other spookables are strictly mythological, and I guess if you think something’s not real then you’re unlikely to notice it hurting you. Even religious people, men and women who are supposed to care about this kinda thing… I’m often shocked how easily obviously demonic influences can fly under their radars.

I suppose the reach of public school is quite long.

If I have any advantages in this area, it is only because I was raised in a bit of a weird way and so avoided acquiring many of the Default Thoughts which most people appear to have had drilled into their heads when they were young. That doesn’t mean I’m right, mind you. Our culture tends to think (in theory if not in practice) that “outsiders”, so-called mavericks and independent thinkers, are more likely to hit upon truth than everyone who’s just going with the flow… but personally I’m not at all sure that that’s the case. I might just be crazy. Entirely possible. Maybe I’m just The Church Lady from back when Saturday Night Live was good, suffering from a kind of evil pareidolia where I see the face of Satan in burnt toast and the cluster formations of my Cheerios.

Maybe.

Whenever you’re the odd man out it’s always a good idea to consider if that’s maybe because you’re the one that’s wrong.

“Could it be… SATAN!?!?”

And, honestly, I sort of wish I could just believe that. It would be nice if I could convince myself that I’m simply delusional and that all this Devil and Evil stuff wasn’t real because, believe you me, the last thing I want to do is portray myself as more schizophrenic than I already have. As an author my worst nightmare is becoming one of those poor souls trapped in the “paranormal” section of Amazon, being consigned to that darkened limbo with people who write UFO books and how-to guides on becoming a pet psychic.

But…

What can I do?

If the goal of Holy is He Who Wrestles is to help people find peace with God again, to help them understand their own souls and teach them to unify the heart which believes with the 21rst century mind which simply can’t…

Then there’s just no way around it.

I legitimately believe this stuff is real and I don’t think you can have an accurate spirituality without it. I’d be doing a disservice to you if I told you about God and The Bible and all that but never connected it to your daily life in the here and now. If I didn’t try to help you see that all that stuff, all those words written about angels and spirits and demons and so on, weren’t just stories. I simply wouldn’t be doing my job if I weren’t trying to help you see that there’s more to our existence than meets the eye.

So, here we are. A series of articles about spiritual taxonomy and how to recognize The Devil.

*Exasperated Sigh*

I guess it had to happen sometime.

I already know these articles will attract the crazies. That I will receive a torrent of barely comprehensible emails that are ostensibly in English. I also know that they will receive criticism from people who think everything in them is ridiculous and impossible. So be it. It’s not ridiculous and it’s not impossible and there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

That said, please remember that nothing herein is claimed to be complete or authoritative. If there exists such a thing as “an expert” in Angelology or Demonology, I am not one of them. What I’m giving you here should be rather considered something like field notes. Things I’ve learned and noted after many years experimenting with the supernatural, struggling with evil, and listening to others tell me their stories. It will necessarily be something of a patchwork.

Here goes nothing.

I hope it helps you, and God preserve me from ending up on the For You page with Ingo Swann

Broad Taxonomies

The spiritual world, like the physical one, is an ecosystem. An ecosystem filled with a diverse and vibrant cast of creatures. For all that though, I would wager that the average person, if he has one at all, has a spiritual taxonomy that only divides spirits up into two or three types. A tripartite classification system of ghost, angel, demon… is probably as detailed as most people are willing to get.

And, fair enough.

Those three categories are useful and, if you’re able to sort spirits accurately into those three bins, immensely helpful for saving your soul. We must understand however that such a system is quite coarse. Aquinas implied somewhere that “Angel” as a category, is only about as specific as the word “animal”, and that therefore there might be “angels” as different from one another in thought and behavior as sea turtles are from orangutans or earth worms. This is why in the Bible things that look like this:

are called “angel” just as much as things that look like this:

or this:

Still, as I say, a coarse taxonomy is better than none at all. Knowing whether something is an animal, a plant, or a fungus might be a three-year old’s level of biological understanding, sure… but it’s better than nothing. With that you’d know some really useful information that could keep you safe, such as the fact that animals can move around and might have sharp teeth, or that some plants can be eaten for food, or that funguses might be poisonous, and therefore probably shouldn’t be.

That’s what we’re going for here.

Broad taxonomies.

I’m not here to try and replace the default ghost, angel, demon categorization system that most of us have in our minds, but rather to help you refine it. I’m not trying to make you into a “spirit expert” … I’m trying to help you recognize poisonous mushrooms and be able to tell them apart from wombats. If that sounds patronizing, I’m sorry, but you must believe me when I say that, for a lot of people, that’s the level of knowledge we’re forced to start with. Public education, religious education, and popular culture have given most people almost nothing to work with in this realm and beyond Demon = Bad, Angel = Good, and Ghost= Dead Human… most people are totally at a loss, and therefore totally vulnerable. Because Good = Angel and Bad = Demon sounds simple enough but, just as it is in our visible ecosystem, mimicry and camouflage is the rule, not the exception. Almost every predator is trying to “blend in” with its environment in order to catch prey unawares and many, many things which the masses might reflexively consider “good” are instantly revealed to be driven by Darkness and Hatred when you know what to look for. As Saint Paul put it, “The Devil masquerades as an angel of light.”

Knowing just a bit about spiritual taxonomy can keep you from being fooled. Remember, demons are primarily parasitical… and like mosquitos or ticks which numb the skin of their victims before sucking them dry, rely heavily on not being noticed.

There’s a snake in this photo. In exactly the same way, evil spirits try to present themselves as Good Ideas.

An Intuitive Map

God didn’t sneeze the universe into existence. Contra to what you might have been taught in school, the world and its various creatures are not random, but rather exist on a Continuum of Being from the nematode and the tardigrade all the way up to Man. If you image Physical Existence… lived experience in a physical body, as being sort of quantized, that is, having various levels at which it can happen, then God has created a world in which every such level is occupied.

Now.

In the physical space? We’re at the top. Men and women exist at the top of the hierarchy of existence at that is why, as you get nearer and nearer to us, the creatures just below us on the ladder have more and more of our general shape. Chimps. Gorillas. Orangutans. The levels just beneath ours are near human, and progress away from our apex down through the monkeys and the primates and the mammals and the birds and the reptiles and the fish and the worms and the plants and the moss… all the way down until Life is almost indistinguishable from the dirt it’s sitting in. Man on one side of the ladder, inanimate matter, rocks and dirt, on the other.

Okay.

Well, the spiritual space is exactly like that… but in the other direction.

Whereas Man is the highest creature in the physical realm, he is the lowest creature in the spiritual realm. Hence, as we’ve already noted, why some angels tend to look a lot like us… because they’re the flip side of chimpanzees. They’re the next level up from us, just as chimps are the next level down. As I noted here, “Man” means “Middle”, and Men and Women occupy the exact middle level between The All Life of God on one side and The No Life of inanimate matter on the other. This is why we are unique. That’s our role. We sit squarely at the intersection of Heaven and Earth and are meant to be intermediaries between the physical and spiritual realms.

We’re a little bit animal… a little bit angel.

She’s a little bit country, I’m a little bit rock and roll.

That’s why we never really feel “at home” here. On Earth I mean. It’s why we can’t be like the other animals and just be okay being naked on the savanna and relieving ourselves in the woods. By the same token, it’s also why we never feel completely “at home” devoting ourselves purely to spiritual matters either, because we possess animalistic urges and needs which are real and have to be tended.

You see my friends, we exist… THE PURPOSE OF OUR EXISTENCE… is to figure out how to square those two.

The Fall in Genesis, whether you want to consider it literal or metaphorical, is about Heaven and Earth splitting apart. In the Garden of Eden, God walked easily about the earth with the animals… and the angels had free reign to come and go and be with us as they pleased. But… when humanity sinned… that connection was severed. Because we are that link. In the fall Matter came apart from Mind and The Bible, in particularly the story of Jesus, is about ending that divorce. Becoming divine again. Arriving at last back to the place where both the animal and the spiritual are satisfied.

That’s your job.

That’s why God put you here.

To connect Heaven and Earth.

And see, just as every level of existence beneath us is occupied, right down to the levels just above inert matter, so too is every level above us occupied, right up to those just next to God.

And those things… those beings of pure mind who have no physical bodies but which are just kind of like… consciousnesses existing in the universe without the need of brains to hold them… is what we’re speaking of when we speak about angels.

And again, as Aquinas noted, that may be a wide range of things indeed.

In fact, crazy as it may sound to say, all manner of beings from folklore are species of angels. Jinn, kami, leprechauns, fairies and elves… to the degree that there is any truth in any of those stories and encounters at all, we can safely say that those cultures were encountering angels. This is not, as some might accuse it, just a way to “retcon” other mythologies into the Christian religion. No. It’s just what “angels” are. The term refers broadly to all invisible beings above humanity but below God and so, if indeed the Arabs ever had dealings with Jinn or the Icelanders with Elves… then they were encountering some representative of the angelic domain. In fact, in Medieval Europe, it was widely speculated that fairies and gnomes and so forth were probably something like “left over” angels. Spirits that hadn’t been bad enough to get cast down to Hell, but which weren’t good enough for Heaven either. They were instead capricious spirits who might be good or bad depending on how you interacted with them and which were, for the moment anyway, stuck here with us, in the middle realms.

Stuck here, in “Middle Earth”.

Frank’s Casket. A chest of likely monastic origin from the early 700s depicting Christian imagery alongside those of other mythologies, including the story of Völund, “Lord of the Elves.”

Now. Ghosts are not that. Ghosts, (at least in the modern usage of the term) are simply the disembodied spirits of physically deceased men and women and now, understanding that we occupy The Middle Position… maybe you see how such could be possible. For if humans are, by definition, the superposition of Matter and Spirit, two halves squished together into one, then one half can die and yet the other go on living. Of course, usually it is the body which dies before the soul but, in some extremely demented individuals we occasionally appear to observe the opposite. In the normal course of things though, a person dies physically and then the soul “passes on” (we hope to Heaven). This process of “passing on” always happens, however, depending on the individual and their circumstances, it can take a shorter or longer (in some cases much longer) time. What we call a “ghost” is therefore simply a soul which is taking a bit of a while to move on.

This “lag time” in passing on is important to note because it explains a great deal about hauntings and ghostly behavior. Skeptics of such things will often try to pose “gotcha” questions about the paranormal, often asking why ghosts only ever appear to be from relatively recent history and why there aren’t any ghosts of cavemen walking around, beating on the walls with their spectral clubs. Well, as you can now see, the answer to that is quite simple. Ghosts from caveman times have had enough time to work through whatever it was that was keeping them attached to our world, as have most of the ghosts from ancient Rome, or the American Revolutionary War. In practice actually, most hauntings appear to be by ghosts less than one hundred years old, with most being far younger than that. In fact, though hard numbers are understandably hard to come by, paranormal reports in aggregate seem to suggest that the vast majority of ghosts only stick around for a few days to a few weeks, ghostly activity arising sharply just after someone’s death and then falling to zero shortly after. As a result of this “moving on with time” behavior, all else being equal and contra what you might expect, most places tend to get “less haunted” with time. Not more. At least, that is, if we’re talking strictly about ghosts.

What causes a human spirit to linger and hang around a physical place for years or decades is a complex subject but appears to be strongly related to Trauma. A person who was murdered for example, or who died in some other horrible fashion, tends to be much more likely to stick around. By the same token, it seems rare that a person who dies peacefully and surrounded by loved ones ever sticks around for very long at all.

Understanding this, most cultures and religions, Christianity included, have (or at least had) rituals and ceremonies to help troubled spirits move on. Though they no longer serve this purpose (at least in the Anglosphere), traditionally festivals such as All Souls Day and Halloween were for this purpose, and you can still see something of what those feast days were originally like in Mexico, where the Dia de los Muertos celebrations still carry on that tradition.

Recognizing ghosts as ghosts is important because, unlike angels (and therefore unlike demons), generally speaking ghosts don’t harm anybody and couldn’t even if they wanted to. The spirits of disembodied men and women are not nearly so strong as those of an angel or a demon and therefore their ability to interact with the physical world or influence your thoughts and feelings is quite limited. In general it seems that almost all ghostly activity is rather something of a cry for help. A confused soul trying to work out what has happened to it. In trying to ground themselves they will often seek out the comforting or the familiar, which is why the stereotypical ghostly activity is what it is. Footsteps walking around their old home for example, or the creaking sounds of them trying to once again sit in a favorite chair. They’re not, usually, seeking to harm you… they just don’t want to leave.

A Scientific Approach

Above all, I hope that this short series of articles of “Field Notes” about spirits will open your eyes to the reality of the spiritual world… even if you have understandable doubts about any of my specific claims. I would like you to see that the paranormal and the supernatural are not, in fact, random and illogical, but that they operate under rules and adhere to patterns of behavior just as the normal and natural world does. That they are, actually, able to be studied. Not in as much detail as we might like, no. But studied nonetheless.

Now, for over a century The Mainstream has dismissed all forms of “woo” on the grounds that it is non-reproducible. Science, at least in theory, relies on observation and experiment. If a phenomenon cannot be reliably replicated under laboratory conditions, then, generally, that is taken as evidence the phenomenon does not exist.

And this logic is sound. Far as it goes.

Dumb matter, a ball rolling down a hill or a set of chemicals reacting in a vial, is going to behave the same way every time, no matter when or where you ask it to perform. You can set up an experiment in Chicago and expect to get the same results you got from the same experiment in a lab in Tennessee. The Conservation of Momentum, Acceleration Due to Gravity, The Second Law of Thermodynamics… these things just happen, and the matter involved in the experiment doesn’t have any mind or will to resist them and to act otherwise. There’s no intelligence in the ball to be able to say, “Hey, you know what? Not feeling it today. I’m tired of the whole F = ma thing. I don’t feel like rolling. Maybe tomorrow.”

The difference of course in our case is that the entire premise of the supernatural is that we are dealing with other sentient minds. Beings who can choose whether they’d like to act or not. By its very nature, The Supernatural needs to be approached more like Anthropology or Zoology instead of Physics or Chemistry. Just as you cannot count on a lion to react the same way to each and every passing zebra, so too are spirits likewise entities with personalities whose behavior is always non-formulaic. When you understand that, you see that the entire basis for the dismissal of such things from The Mainstream has no legs. For, in point of fact, “paranormal” things, just like zoological or anthropological things are reproducible.

They’re just not reproducible on demand.

Big difference.

Ghosts are probably the best example of this actually. I mean, what could possibly be more reproducible than ghosts? It’s a phenomenon which literally every culture since the dawn of time, over the entire world, has claimed to have experienced. A phenomenon so common that one in five Americans claim to have directly observed it. Contra the claim of The Mainstream, ghosts are reproducible. They happen over and over again.

Just… not whenever you want them to.

Reproducible. But not on demand.

That’s the sort of intellectual landscape we have to be okay working in. As I said, by its very nature it’s not going to be as precise a field of study as we might like it. That doesn’t mean hard evidence is impossible though. Not at all. People have, for example, taken photographs of spirits. We’ve even recorded the voices of spirits on tape. However, again, because you usually can’t return to the same place and take the same photo or capture the same recording, such hard evidence can always be written off as a lens flare or a trick of the brain if you would like.

In the realm of the paranormal… believing enables seeing.

It doesn’t work the other way round.

My own experience has been that, if you actually get out there and look for the supernatural you will find it and, once you do, you can begin to pick out patterns in your experiences that form a cohesive picture. A picture that, coincidentally, tends to line up pretty well with the notions of spirits present in most traditional religions.

What will follow in this series will by my own notes and attempts to form such a cohesive picture, much of it drawn from either first or close second-hand experience. Again, we’re just trying to get a bare bones understanding here, something akin to teaching a toddler to recognize a mammal by the fact that it has hair. This is an exercise in spiritual taxonomy for survival purposes, so you won’t be fooled by a snake’s camouflage or a spider that’s mimicking an ant… it’s not an attempt to give you an exhaustive understanding of the various kinds of angels.

This is actually a spider. Isn’t that awful?

See, Disembodied Minds… ghosts, angels, demons… if they do exist… have goals.

They’re after something.

The goal of this series is to help you detect when they’re after you.

Amor Vincit Omnia.