Back in America after 9 years away!

For you folks who've been looking in on this site (and there've been quite a few) I apologize for being away for over a year!


Almost all of 2011 was taken up with the move from one country (Cyprus — part Middle-East, part Europe) back to the U.S., and when back most of the rest of the year was taken up looking for and getting an apartment, and then shipping a container full of our stuff over here — weight-wise mostly books! — and setting up so that's it's livable.  Which it now is.


You can see by the new Lightning Sword Journal image that there are going to be changes in focus.
From 2009 to 2010 I preached through the Book of Revelation, 60 sermons in all, not including the Babylon series.  I should explain how I came to be doing that:  With the help of an OPC (Orthodox Presbyterian Church) pastor I planted a church in the city of Limassol, and pastored it for four and a half years (and, earlier, an Arabic Evangelical church on the same premises for two and a half years.  With the Arabic-speaking folks I mostly spoke through translators).


At any rate, for over a year I pondered and studied the Book of Revelation.  I mean, I had been reading it for some forty years, but now studied it in depth, so as to be able to fully comprehend it, and then teach it.  Below I'll give a list of some of the commentators I used at that time, as well as some more I am studying presently.


It's an electrifying book!  In it the risen Lord Jesus speaks to the seven churches in Asia Minor (modern Turkey), and not just to them, but to all the churches extant then, and to all the churches up through the ages till now, and even till the end of this age.  Imagine the Son of God addressing a particular congregation, with either reproof or commendation, or a mixture of both!  And thus these letters — there are seven of them, one each to the seven churches — speak to varying conditions in all the churches, if faithfully unpacked by godly pastors.


And then the unfolding of the New Covenant period — from the ascension of Jesus Christ, the God-Man, till His return at the end of this age and the resurrection of the dead, the great Day of Judgment, and the commencement of the destinies of the damned and the blessed, the former in what Christ calls "the lake of fire" and the latter on the New Heaven and Earth, where God has chosen to actually dwell in the midst of His beloved people, which He calls the Bride of His Son, in an eternity of festive rejoicing and glory.  But in that New Covenant period of the present age — symbolically depicted as "1,000 years", a millennium — there will be a terrible battle of the powers of darkness and death against the New Covenant people of God.  These people will stand faithful in the face of whatever the hostile world throws at them, and where they fail, the mercy of their God will cleanse and sustain them — for the times will be very difficult.


The Book goes into some detail regarding these things, as well as the judgments of the Almighty upon the world that persecutes His blood-bought children, and worships the idols this world manufactures in their hearts and loves (idols such as beauty, power, wealth, comfort, illicit pleasure, race, religion, etc).


The Revelation also talks about an entity called "Babylon the great", its oppression of the nations generally and the people of God — called "the saints" — in particular, its manifestation in various world powers, including Chaldean Babylon and the Roman Empire, and some mysterious political-economic-military entity manifesting at the end of the age, which shall surpass in brazen audacity all the oppressive pleasure-loving empires of the ages.  That shall be the primary focus of Lighting Sword Journal for a while.  Stay tuned.

Supernatural Deception

For those who take the prophecies of the Apocalypse seriously, as well depictions of angels, this show seems to be serving the purpose of distorting all things pertaining to God and Heaven to the end of poisoning minds and hearts to the reality of these things.

Angels are shown to be evil, haters of humans, and ambivalent toward God. God is shown (in this show) to be indifferent – callous – toward humans, "a deadbeat dad" in Dean's words. Those angels who are for the humans rebel against the orders of Heaven to do so. Heaven is shown to be a weird space where all who go there have their own little scenes that sometimes intersect with others' scenes, but mainly are isolated. Angels can intrude into these scenes, and so those humans who get there learn to dodge them.

The "four horsemen of the apocalypse" – taken from the Book of Revelation's 6th chapter – are shown to be individual characters having traits pertaining to, respectively, war, famine, pestilence, and death. These are like comic book stereotypes of those symbolic riders of their horses, the last three of which in reality standing for waves of destruction increasingly moving across the earth as judgments sent for various reasons.

In Revelation 6, the first horseman, who sat on a white horse, wore a crown, and went forth conquering, is Christ, or His gospel of salvation, going forth through the earth winning hearts by his love and truth (with war and trouble following hard after Him), although some good commentators do differ on this interpretation of the first horseman. In a separate writing these things will be gone into in depth.

So there are really three horsemen who work ill, the one on a red horse, with a great sword, who took peace from the earth; the rider on a black horse, signifying famine, and the one on a pale horse – of a sickly greenish color – killing by various means.

It's fascinating to see the working out of these forces up through the almost 2,000-year period of this prophecy to our own day, all these things constantly intensifying.

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As the 4th season draws to a close (what a disappointment to learn this will drag on into a 5th!), we hear the cursing of God by a "good" angel – Cass – and then see such a distortion of the Revelation's vision of "harlot Babylon" as relegates it to meaninglessness. In fact, John's Apocalypse shows the symbolic visions of Babylon and its final destruction to be most pertinent to our own days. All this is lost in Supernatural's popular disinformation orgy.

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Rather than, in reality, Death having entered the world through sin – by the alienation of the first man from the life-source of God – we have Death personified as a character supposedly "as old as God", and one who says he will eventually take God's life also.

All the ideas in this fiction are so bizarre compared to the reality of spiritual truths.

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We are left in the 4th season with Sam having tricked – and spiritually overpowered – the devil, casting him back into Hell, although Sam went there also, for the devil had been possessing Sam and was in Sam's body, and the only way to put Satan "back in his cage" was for Sam to jump in while possessed.

Dean is somehow made out to be a "true servant of God" in the next to last (21st) episode, though how such a foul-mouthed ungodly – yet likable – rake could be called such defies reason.

There are no "redeeming qualities" in Dean – or in any of us – that would warrant such an exalted title, "a true servant of God".

What redeems us is the cleansing we receive through Christ's blood (an innocent life given for the guilty), and His death for sin in our stead – and further, that righteousness of absolute moral perfection which is the Man Christ Jesus' bestowed upon us as a royal gift of the heavenly Father to His beloved children. Washed clean of all defilement – anything that would render us unworthy to stand in the presence of the infinitely holy God – and clothed in Christ's own righteousness, we have been redeemed from the realm of darkness and made fit to stand in Heaven, now adopted sons and daughters in the royal family of God.

But Jesus Christ is totally absent from the Supernatural deception (save for one brief curse). For if He were to be in it – as He really is (accurately depicted in the New Testament) – He would show the lie of the whole series, a tawdry little fantasy seducing multitudes from a right understanding of things with eternal significance.

Supernatural's plot

It seems certain after the recent episode (5.13), The Song Remains the Same — though it was clear before that — the theme they will drive home at the end of this season is that humans have free will, and Sam and Dean will be able to prevail over both the devil and (the supposed) "God" and his bunch of unsavory angels, maintaining their freedom from being possessed by either. Both Satan (so the fictitious story line goes) and the archangel Michael have told them they cannot escape their destinies to embody these spirit beings and so be "vessels" for their cosmic showdown and battle, Sam destined to die in the process. The brothers rightly see this as denigrating to their humanity and are determined to remain unpossessed. Their weakness is their love for each other, and this has been capitalized upon before — and was the downfall of their dad, John, also.

This is, despite all the debauchery, delusion, and silliness one has to wade through, a significant issue. The reason I am responding to this television show is because it encroaches upon a reality I live in, and such popular disinformation cannot but harm multitudes. It is an axiom that deception is a prime weapon in warfare. And there is a spiritual warfare really going on.

There is an Apocalypse, and we are in it now. But who rightly depicts it — at least in an understandable manner?

This is what Michael tells Dean, when Dean doubts the supposed plan "God" has in store,

"And you think you know better than my father?" Michael asks. "One unimportant little man? What makes you think you get to choose?" "Because I gotta believe that I can choose what I do with... my unimportant little life," Dean says. "You’re wrong," Michael says. "You know how I know? Think of a million random acts of chance, that let John and Mary be born. To meet. To fall in love, to have the two of you. Think of the million random choices that you make, and yet each and every one of them brings you closer to your destiny. Do you know why that is? Because it's not random. It's not chance. It's a plan that is playing itself out perfectly. Free will is an illusion, Dean. That's why you’re going to say yes . . . You can't fight City Hall."

This "yes" pertains to Dean having to give consent before Michael can possess him (the same true for Sam and Satan).

So the "artists" behind the show — the script-writers — have set up a straw man they're going to knock down: humans don't have free will, they're just puppets. I am reminded of something Dostoevsky said; Nicholas Berdyaev, in his little volume, Dostoevsky (Living Age Books – Meridian, 1968), shows how Dostoevsky also was greatly wrought upon over the matter of human freedom. In Letters from the Underground, Dostoevsky's hero says of a human being,

All he needs is an independent will, whatever it may cost him and wherever it may lead him…. In only one single case does man consciously and deliberately want something absurd, and that is the silliest thing of all, namely, to have the right to want the absurd and not be bound by the necessity of wanting only what is reasonable…. for at all events it will have safeguarded our dearest and most essential possession—our personality and individuality…. If you say that everything, chaos, darkness, anathema, can be reduced to mathematical formulae, that it is possible to anticipate all things and keep them under the sway of reason by means of an arithmetical calculation, then man will go insane on purpose so as to have no judgment and to behave as he likes. I believe this because it appears that man's whole business is to prove to himself that he is a man and not a cog-wheel. [Italics Berdyaev’s] (pages 52, 53)

It is a real and very important matter, this business of free will, and relatedly, what it is to be human! So I'd like to talk about it a little here. In relation to God — the true God — what is the status of our wills?

It is obvious we have free wills. I can choose what kind of computer I'll buy, what kind of hiking shoes I'll get, what I'll eat in my next meal. I have all manner of choices, and I am free to make them. Of course I can not choose what is beyond my ability, such as producing $1,000,000 by tomorrow, as that's beyond what I am able to get. Nor can I choose to grow two inches, or to become twenty years younger. You get my point. Where our ability to choose becomes limited — whatever the cause — our free will is bound and cannot attain its desire.

But in relation to God, which is how the plot of the story is going, is it true that "free will is an illusion"? Is it true, as this supposed angel says with regard to willing, "You can't fight City hall"? In other words, you can't exercise your will but are a puppet to the divine decree? This is what Dean is being told, and he is also being told what exactly this decree is: "You're going to say yes" and allow yourself to be possessed by this "angel". And you will be the vehicle for the power that will destroy the vessel of your brother, Sam, and the evil spirit, Satan, who is possessing him. Dean is just a puppet in the hands of "God" — or his unsavory henchmen "angels" — in a cosmic war where humans are expendable "unimportant little" creatures, no matter they love and suffer, they are but pawns in a bigger game. And this Dean will not have, nor will we if we value our humanity.

But what about the true God? Granted, this show does not depict Him or His angels or the demons with any semblance of truth. but what about the real spiritual world, what gives there?

It goes like this: there is a history of the human race, believed or not, that makes this issue clear. A quote from the ancient man of God, Augustine,

"It was by the evil use of his free will that man destroyed both it and himself."

In a nutshell, The destruction of the primal man and woman's partaking of the divine nature through siding with the (actual) devil against God led to an alienation so profound that he became a spiritual child of Satan, under his control and in bondage to a nature corrupted and limited by sin, unable any longer to approach God or in any way please Him. He was an utter alien to God, utterly hostile to Him, even as his new ontologic father the devil is. R. C. Sproul has well said,

"Man's will is free to follow his inclinations, but fallen man's inclinations are always and invariably away from God."

It is like a man in prison is free to choose within the confines of his lock-up, but cannot go outside it, unless a governor or president grant him a pardon.

God said through His apostle Paul,

"There is none righteous, no, not one: there is none that understands, there is none that seeks after God . . . there is none that does good, no, not one." (Letter to the Romans 3:10-12)

So man is no longer free to make choices with respect to the will of God. He just doesn't have it in him. However, those who hear God's words, realize the truth in them, and — having been quickened inwardly by the life and power in them — turn and ask Him for mercy and a new heart able to love and obey Him, these find a new spiritual birth and entrance into His presence. Now they are able and willing to freely choose. Such "new creatures" (as Paul calls them) do indeed have the ability to choose to disobey God, but the new heart God has given them increasingly desires — effectually desires — to please the One who has done such good to them.

But back to the story. You see it is more nuanced a matter than the evil fairy tale Supernatural spins. Were Dean not such a wanton womanizer, but rather a true son of the true God who saved his heart and body for a woman he committed his life to in marriage, and who kept the commandments of God, he would be able to say to a demon — or to the devil himself — "Be gone, in the name of Jesus Christ" and the devil would have to flee from the power of God's Spirit in those words.

There is so much jive nonsense in this program that it clouds up the mind and heart as regards the truth!

To inject some reality into the show: In his default condition, Dean's will is in bondage to his fallen and darkened nature. In this state he is a slave of Satan and cannot fight or resist him; his desires control him, and Satan can manipulate these. Likewise with Sam; if he were a "new creature", born of God, partaking of the Spirit of Christ to energize, illumine, and liberate his own spirit, the devil could have no power over him. Only in union with the Spirit and heart of Jesus Christ is there the power and wisdom to regain the free use of our wills, and to resist that which ordinarily would overpower us, be it demons, Satan, or our desires.

I hear from the grapevine there will be a sixth season of this show. I'm greatly disappointed — I thought it would be done with this year!

The misinformation put out by it is significant. The "horsemen" depicted, such as War and Famine, are silly cartoons of that which the real horsemen in Revelation chapter 6 symbolize.

Castiel: "Your Bible gets more wrong than it does right."

Now we get the "angel" Castiel dissing the Bible (Hollywood knows best, folks), and opining that the boy, Jesse (Episode 6), has the immense power — and could be manipulated — to "destroy the host of heaven".

The boy purportedly born of a virgin impregnated by a demon. Castiel says that such a one is called "the antichrist".

Seeing as this impinges upon something real that both exists and, in a final form, is coming upon the human scene, I will remark on it.

The apostle John (author of the Book of Revelation) in his Epistles says there were many antichrists in his day, and would be up through the ages. They would be discerned by two things, they came out of the Christian church but were not Christians, and they taught that Jesus was not "God manifest in the flesh". The apostle Paul taught of the appearance at the end of the age of one he called the "man of sin" (or "lawlessness"), and the ancient Hebrew prophet Daniel, about 2,500 years ago, taught of one called "the little horn" (a symbolic term) who would go after the people of God at the end of this age to destroy them, deceiving all others on the earth to give him their allegiance, much as the pied piper led the lemmings over the cliff to their deaths. In the Revelation itself there is something called "the beast", which signifies both a government which persecutes the people of God — over the course of the
Christian era — as well referring to an individual at the end of the age who will lead a government of this type. These diverse streams of prophetic revelation (and there is more than mentioned here) can be understood to give a good picture of the characteristics of this person who is called "the antichrist".

But who wanted to know the reality of these things? You just wanted to be entertained, right? To be lulled to sleep while the grim reapers of the infernal realm gathered their gory harvest to keep them company in the lake of fire, in anguish unending.

I see there are more flicks coming soon. 2012 and the great catastrophe, an attempt to mimic (and minimize?) the Day of the Lord. I'll write about that shortly, and also Terminator Salvation (TS) (which I haven't seen, and will, DV, when it comes out on DVD in November). The latter, from what I know if it, seeks to posit a Judgment Day which also minimizes the actual one coming. All I'll say about TS's view for the moment is that it gives a hope of salvation from its day of judgment, and an overcoming of those who brought it to pass — the bad guys (if you can call machines "guys"). But the genuine Judgment Day will not be as depicted there.

Yes, I will have to devote a post to showing the reality of it from the true sources. Stay tuned.

"Zombie Viruses"? Isn't this old stuff?

The zombie, one who is dead yet possessing animation and intelligence, is an ancient phenomenon, and it walks the pages of world myth and literature, its presence in contemporary media likewise frequent and robust.

There are variations on this "living dead" theme. It is ever a popular creature in horror flicks, although often upstaged by what actually are its children, the vampire and werewolf, as these latter appear more "lively" — energetic — than mom and dad. But this is a false perception.

The zombie theme has recently been making the rounds. In I Am Legend genetic engineering leads to a virus being loosed that turns 95% of humankind into zombies of some sort, ghoulish cannibals — darkseekers — attacking those few living left on earth. It was also touted as a possible future in a recent Supernatural episode, a virus loosed by the devil that "turned people into monsters" ravaging those unaffected.

The zombie is more generic a monster than its flamboyant offspring. It is the first of the monster line — in the human sphere — and its nature is the essence of those begotten by it, vampire and werewolf. This was spoken of a couple of posts before this.

A baseline for discernment is: if one does not possess eternal life, and the glory of union with the divine nature, now, in this life then one is of the eternally dead, even though temporarily possessed of an animate human body. Further, there are imitations — counterfeits — of life / divine union which deceive multitudes. Union with Christ — according to the Biblical pattern — is the only authentic life. But there are counterfeits in that realm also — is it not clear that we are a species under horrific assault? — and deception is a prime weapon in the vast warfare.

The actual "zombie virus" is not a virus (though that is a good analogy), but a state of being we as a species were brought into by our primordial ancestors. It is a fait accompli, a done thing. The task is to find the antidote, the cure! And there is one.

It is often written about in these posts and elsewhere on this site.

Looking at "Supernatural" part 2

The fifth season has started and many souls are tuned in as the Apocalypse unfolds, our heroes Dean and Sam caught up among beings with powers far greater than any they possess. And we see Lucifer has taken possession of a vessel (Nick), and prepares to wreak havoc. Dean gives Sam a vote of no confidence for his foray into drawing upon demon power for strength, and it seems their friendship is endangered. They go their separate ways for the time being.

Meanwhile, the real Apocalypse takes place around us and we do not see it, lulled as we are in a sleep of death concerning the reality of such things: God, other spiritual beings, and foretold impending cataclysms. Lulled by exciting fictions, various deceptions, and of course a panoply of pleasures to soothe our angsts, and lastly (and perhaps mostly) by a natural antipathy to even the idea there is a God we shall someday stand before and give account to! The Terminator "Judgment Day" a walk in the park compared to the real item that approaches! More on this shortly.

What's going on here? We are in a skillfully orchestrated media blitz of potent disinformation. Potentially lethal disinformation! Few have the knowledge and the vision to discern it. No, this is not a media conspiracy. Writers and producers intuit from what is in the collective consciousness. But there are spiritual forces who act as "muses" to the artists of the day, giving them inspiration. There is a symbolic depiction of this in Revelation (Rev) 9:2, where smoke rises out of the abyss, "and the sun and the air were darkened" by it. We see a little later in that chapter that the "smoke" was actually a great horde of demons loosed (likened to a cloud of locusts), and they were given power to torment men. Ultimately this deception (what disinformation is) caused great torment, as it poisoned their minds to the only saving truth, resulting in devastation and destruction beyond reckoning. In Hell. The real Hell.

Back to Supernatural. We are presented with a bizarre interpretation of the 2nd "horseman of the Apocalypse" — called "War" in the show — from Revelation chapter 6 (not 8 as the show has it, and unrelated to the "Wormwood" of 8); his "horse" is a fire engine red Ford Mustang, and he does some magic spells with a ring he turns on his finger, in order to delude people into killing one another. Dean and Sam manage to get War to leave after removing his magic ring. A silly cartoon version of the actual symbolic horseman.

It seems some of the angels — particularly the supposed "archangel Raphael" — think God is dead, else "how could all the terrible things that happened in the 20th century be explained?" Castiel, a lower angel who has befriended Dean does not think so, and he goes off to search for Him. These depictions are travesties of angels!

We have some really strange stuff in this series. One of the things we are told is that it was Dean who began the countdown to the Apocalypse by breaking the first of 66 seals — and it seems he was the first seal, that being a righteous man who, after being tortured in Hell, turned to evil. Dean was surely no righteous man! (As those who follow the series know!) Nor do the righteous go to Hell. We are also told that Sam broke the last, the 66th seal, when he killed a demon who had taken over a human body. This supposedly inaugurated the Apocalypse proper by allowing Lucifer access to the world and to a human body / vessel.

This is really jive stuff! Are folks who are into this at all interested in the source material this show is riding the coattails of? I'm referring to the Book of Revelation itself, and to the accompanying writings in Jesus Christ's New Testament.

The reason I ask is because of the importance of the matter. The Apocalypse is not merely grist for the entertainment mill, but addresses our own eternal lives and deaths. Although I haven't heard His name mentioned in the show (save once when used as an expletive by Dean), it is remarkable that Jesus Christ is the central figure in the apostle John's Book of Revelation (aka, the Apocalypse), yet ignored in the TV show. In the primary and authentic source it is Jesus who opens each of the seven seals, having earned the right because of His thorough defeat of Satan, making atonement for sin for all His people (both from the Old Testament times and the New), His absolute moral perfection, pleasing the Father in everything, and fulfilling all that was needed to be the Mediator between God and men. The seals He opens signify the decree of God for the people of earth, both His church and His enemies, and the execution of this manifold plan that has been unfolding since Christ ascended into Heaven, and was seated on the Throne of power.

Each seal has profound significance, and reveals major dynamics in play upon the world stage, all of which are set in motion — and controlled, even in the minutiae — by the one who has been crowned King of all the universe by the Father almighty. Even as the Lord Jesus suffered at the hands of God's enemies, so also His people will suffer. And they are willing to do so, for their love of Him is greater than the love even of their own lives.

In Supernatural we find there a scholar of sorts, Bobby, who is given to poring over old books of arcane knowledge, seeking wisdom and understanding to help the hunters through their various trials and adventures. In the real world there are likewise scholars who have devoted much of their lives researching and pondering the difficult symbols and sayings of the Book of Revelation, a majority of which come from the Hebrew Old Testament, and are the keys to unlocking them. To list a few: G. K. Beale, The Book of Revelation: A Commentary on the Greek Text; William Hendriksen, More Than Conquerors; Dennis E. Johnson, Triumph of the Lamb; Herman Hoeksema, Behold, He Cometh!; Kim Riddlebarger, The Man of Sin: Uncovering the Truth About the Antichrist (although this last one does not focus on Revelation in its entirety, but on one of the major players in it, and Riddlebarger goes through the Book of Daniel, Paul's 2nd Letter to the Thessalonians, John's 1st and 2nd Epistles, as well pertinent parts of Revelation in his examination. Of course Bobby in Supernatural is just a comic-book caricature of a scholar, while these others are among the best in the field worldwide. Another excellent resource is Arturo Azurdia on Revelation, 81 sermons in MP3.

In reality, angels and demons do not use humans as "vessels", though there is possession of humans by demons (angels never do this — ever), and varying degrees of infiltration into the faculties of humans, through being deceived or deliberate involvement in evil. There may also be the "channeling" of a demon, as in seances and other activities of spiritualism. The unique thing about Jesus is that God prepared a body for Him — it was His own body, not someone else's! — and He came into this world to take upon Himself human nature, He who was eternal Son in the triunity of the Godhead. (I have heard it put by Francis Beckwith, "Within the nature of the one God, there are three centers of consciousness, and these three centers are distinct and personal.")

This is really something, that the eternal God, for love of our species, and to rescue us from our vast ruination, assumed our nature, to live the lives we could not live, and die the deaths we could not die, so that His merit might be applied to us by virtue of our union with Him. Is this hard to understand? It is of the highest importance that we do so, for in it is forgiveness of sins and eternal life, free for the asking. Where can one learn of these things? Finding a true community of God's people who have sound teaching is not easy, but it can be done. However, not everything that calls itself a "Christian church" is in fact such.

At any rate, this whole vessel thing in the show is bogus. Look, I do not mind giving "the willing suspension of disbelief" (Samuel Coleridge) when hearing a good tale, but to bring falsehood into the business of our salvation or damnation is a terrible thing. Our eternal souls are on the line. Dean was right about one thing, Hell is no picnic. And any thing that heads us in that direction is bad news!

To be continued.

A true occultist warrior-priest looks at Supernatural

As I introduce the piece, "A true occultist warrior-priest looks at Supernatural", a few preliminary remarks.

Some folks, Christians among them, get bent out of shape, my using this terminology, so I will define my terms.

Concerning “the occult”: its root meaning – coming from the Latin occulere – is hidden (from view), concealed, covered over; in medicine it is used as in the terms “occult blood in the stool,” or “occult carcinoma.” I use it in a neutral sense, not specifically referring to demonic practitioners (as common usage does) unless so indicated. The prayers (and prayer warfare!) of a man of God as well as the spells of a sorcerer are both in the realm of the occult – hidden from human eyes! – or so is my use of the word in these writings. The use of the term “warrior-priest” will become apparent in due time.

There are multitudes of folks who are turned off to religion and religiosity, as I am myself. By religion I mean “a cultural and spiritual worldview held with zeal and devotion, the moral and ritual observances thereof defining character, more than – and often to the exclusion of – the reality of consciousness.” I know that’s a mouthful, but it succinctly says what I mean.

Without apology I own myself an occultist, as I have defined it. What’s the big deal? I have gone after demons to break their power over friends and loved ones. In this I but imitate the undisputed Champion in this warfare, as I am encouraged to do in the Writings. I have, in earlier years, been snared and defeated by demonic adversaries, spending near two decades in regions of darkness, in both the Abyss and amid humans, in what I call the archetypal howling heartlands – also known as the psychedelic wildernesses of the ‘60s (which went into the ‘70s and ‘80s and on). I’ve never been a “religious” person, though I do indeed hold to a “spiritual worldview” with zeal and devotion, yet not submerging consciousness beneath morality, and as for rituals, I observe exceeding few!

Am I a Christian? I surely will not deny I follow Christ and keep His word, for – as ancient Samson with his hair – heart-union with Him is the source of my strength.

Where I see a race of beings seduced into darkness and horror by a sadistic but brilliant monster of great power, with the Creator of this race devising a way for them to regain – nay, surpass – their former state of being through a remarkable rescue, others often smear religious gunk over the story, prescribe all sorts of rituals and traditions, making it an altogether distasteful thing, except perhaps for religious types who like that sort of stuff. Where I see a warfare the playing field of which is one’s perceptual field, with invisibility-cloaked predators adept at stealth intrusions into this field of consciousness, able to affect mind, imagination, volition, emotions, even the physical body, and our response the discernment of such, and the exposing of this activity, along with the use of a dazzling display of spiritual weaponry for the overcoming of said predators (worse than Sigourney’s, truth be told), others often see only moral conduct, conformity to certain ways of talking and dressing, believing certain teachings unexamined or tested, and having little or no experience of actual consciousness of the teachings and spirit realities involved.

The other end of this spectrum consists of those who are completely irreligious – believing none of such things one way or the other – but who devote much of their lives (their consciousness, time, and energy) to film, books, and / or computer games dealing with imaginary adversaries (these may be demonic, alien, or other) and elaborate warfare and sagas concerning such. Getting lost in fiction may be as dangerous as being “found” in religion.

The work (featured here), A Great and Terrible Love (AGATL), is the history of my experiences in various realms of the spirit world, and human situations. Women played an important part in my survival – who can live without love? – as has the world of letters, especially poetry. As will be seen, I do not mean that versification alluded to by Ferlinghetti in his Populist Manifesto:

We have seen the best minds of our generation 

destroyed by boredom at poetry readings.

At least at its inception, the story told is neither pretty nor holy (my definition of “holy” is being free of the demonic and having a purity of heart in union with the Christ), but the tale is a true account. There is a lack of true accounts in this realm, and while the conduct and states of the “protagonist” may at times be unsavory (with no sexual explicitness) and horrific, it has the virtue of being, first of all actual, and secondly – eventually – leading to an illumination rarely depicted in literature. From these two qualities comes its redeeming value.


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A true occultist warrior-priest looks at Supernatural


Those who are strongly interested in spiritual and occult matters, please note that this, as well as other writings in Lightning Sword Journal, are not fiction.

One of the things that makes Supernatural so appealing are the deep and simple human responses of Dean Winchester to supernatural forces greater than himself – be they supposedly good or evil; he is irreverent, cynical, defiant, and humorous. Being far from a “religious” type – and his brother Sam much like him – Dean can function amid demons and angels without losing credibility or appeal. No “belief agenda” is being pushed on us, and so we can engage the story without resistance.

Did I say, “No ‘belief agenda’ ”? Well, no overt agenda! The show purports to be an adventure with demon and monster hunters going after these evil entities, but the methods they use to dispatch them, the nature and activities of these entities, and much else is sheer fiction. Which is not to say there are no monstrous entities in reality, though the show’s depiction of them is unreal.

There are such things as demons, or devils; and there are such things as ghosts, but they are not as shown. Ghost is another name for spirit, but the spirits / ghosts of deceased humans do not have the freedom to stay on the earth, they are in regions called Hell or Heaven, and may not depart those places. I will not broach the topic of dreams of deceased loved ones here, for that is a separate matter.

When ghosts of departed people are sighted or heard from these are but devils impersonating them (they can do it well, as they may have been in proximity to them all their lives); the souls of the departed do not have the liberty to leave their respective abodes prior to the great gathering of the Resurrection.

Salt, iron, silver, “holy water” etc are not efficacious in warding off demons. Demons cannot have bodies and so there is no such thing as “demon blood”. While it is true demons can possess humans, the bodies are not theirs, nor is the blood in them theirs in any respect.

There is power and effective method for withstanding assaults of demons; also for casting demons out of those possessed, though this is rare nowadays – more common is giving the knowledge and power to a human host to evict demons who have entered their life (short of full possession) through that person turning from evil and renouncing their participation in it. It is a moral change of heart, and the entrance of a greater power that expels the demon from one’s person.

About vampires. In season 3, we have an episode with them in it. Although these creatures have been discussed at length in “Horror on Apokalypse Field” and “King of the Strung-Out Soldiers” (see A Great and Terrible Love), I will mention them here briefly. They certainly exist, but not as legend and myth portray them. The secret is darker and deeper than they indicate. They are among the living dead, those beings who possess unending existence but do not have unending Life, that illumination of love and glory which marks the difference between Hell and Heaven. When I say they are among the living dead, I mean humans in this life now. That would include the majority of humankind. We are so filled up with the pleasures and activities of this life, our plans and dreams and thoughts, that we do not take proper inventory of our state of being. The primordial human after the first great Wounding, which was the dread sting of death, and which bereaved us of our true Life, is properly called a zombie, and he was the father of us all. This is the human condition, notwithstanding the glorious skin coverings we possess. Have you eternal life? If you are dead to that realm now, you are dead period. Vampire and werewolf refer mainly to feeding styles, psychically speaking. They both are of the lineage of the archetypal zombie. How we love to project it out into monsters on film and paper! Not us! We’re happy human beings! The monsters are “out there”! Who knows C.S. Lewis' saying,

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that even the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare.... There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations – these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit – immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. (The Weight of Glory)

The seed of what we shall be is at the heart of what we now are. If we are the living dead, we shall be the undying damned. The doctor who does not diagnose truly will never give a true cure.

Can one talk of Christ without being religious? It is not easy because such talk is usually saturated with religious content. What do I mean by religious, then, in the pejorative manner I am using it here?

Here are some examples: when ritual replaces activity of the heart, i.e., we participate in religious rituals but have no experience or knowledge of the actual presence of Christ or God. We have faith in our rituals pleasing God (which is not to say this is true faith), but we do not know Him, and are not united in heart with Him. True faith is having confidence in what God has said, not what the traditions of men say. In this age, however, having such confidence may not come easy, if it ever has!

Sometimes people think that “being good” and keeping moral commandments earns them points with God – God now beholden to favor them for their “goodness” – so there can be “good” people who are moral, but have no experience of God’s presence. When such moral people look at those less “good” than themselves, they look with disdain.

Sometimes (this is another example) we are full of religious talk, theology this, theology that, doctrine this, doctrine that, Amen this, Praise the Lord that, but where is our consciousness? How many would say that the immediate experience of Deity constitutes the greater part of their awareness?

When I talk of Jesus Christ – and I mean the historical person, Jesus who hailed from ancient Nazareth in Israel – I am referring to Him in the living moment. No, He is no longer dead and buried, but lives an endless life elsewhere, and He is present to those who are united to Him.

If this is “religious” to you, rather than simply awareness in the spirit worlds, then maybe I’ve lost you, but to adhere to narratives – and narrative in film may be extremely powerful – where the supernatural is depicted, without possessing a power and understanding greater than the demonic which is manifested, there is danger, for you have opened your mind and heart to thoughts with supernatural power. Deception is a power; the poisoning of the mind to distrust the Deity and His angelic messengers is a great power.

All of which is to say, Supernatural really is supernatural! For it posits a spiritual worldview quite forcefully; its source is spiritual: Angels are devious and not to be trusted, having malign agendas (we won’t fully learn of till season 5), demons the same. God “is not in the house” according to one angel, and those angels who speak in His name are evil, though purporting to be the “good guys”. It is clear then, Supernatural is a vehicle for the spreading of serious disinformation concerning God, the angels, demons, humans, and many other things. It may be entertaining (and it is), but at heart it is information warfare designed to distort clarity of thought and accuracy of knowledge concerning what is needed to know the Deity and enter into a saving heart-union with Him, thus being transferred out of the realm of the power of darkness. It is a potentially lethal dose of falsehood.

One angel – who fell – said that only four angels have ever seen God, all the rest of them take His existence “by faith”? And this particular angel said she removed “the grace” that was in her and threw it away as though it were a thing or faculty inherent within her – when she threw it it fell to earth and gave birth to a huge oak tree miraculously. The one true source we have of realities in the heavens – the revelation the Deity has given humankind, His word spoken (and written) through prophets of the Hebrew people – says that multitudes, angels and human both, have seen God, though sometimes His radiance is so great they must shield their eyes. Nor is grace any such thing as depicted in the show: rather it is the undeserved favor of the Deity, the blessing of His mighty presence and love. Grace pertains to relationship, not qualities inherent in the angelic (or human) being.

An important spiritual term, “the Apocalypse”, is distorted; the book which mainly speaks of this, the Apostle John’s Revelation in the Bible, is referred to by one of the “good” hunter characters, Bobby; he says, “The widely distributed version is just for tourists, you know.” Meaning the Biblical version is for dilettantes, but his true version – the secret one for the elite – is the one to trust. You can take Hollywood’s word for it!

The last episode of the season was titled, “Lucifer Rising”, and through a series of events was scheduled to finally manifest in the world, supposedly to wreak havoc, unless the characters, Dean, Sam & company, can somehow thwart or defeat him.

I see on the net that the first show of the 5th season is to be titled, “Sympathy for the devil” (after the Stones’ song). So we shall see what gives.

Oddly (they must have some savvy consultants), in the actual apocalypse these are around the days when the devil is loosed from his partial imprisonment (his activity has been restrained to a set limit) to wage a certain war on the earth.

The term “apocalypse” means uncovering or revelation, and this is the chief characteristic of John the apostle’s famous last book of the Bible, which is called the Apocalypse, or Book of Revelation. What it reveals is God’s agenda for this age. This is how it starts:

The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave to him, to show to his servants things which must shortly come to pass; and he sent and signified it by his angel to his servant John...

That word “signified” in the original Greek – in the present context – means to reveal though signs or symbols, that is, images. I will continue this vein of writing, and will be talking of what Revelation shows has come upon the earth, is upon it now, and is coming, and also, what is transpiring in the Heavens, for it is from there the decrees originate, and cause things to manifest on the earth.