The Mystical Quaballah.

In my last post , I posed the question  - what exactly did Jesus encounter in the man called 'Legion'?

For many people today, the Devil does not exist, and any talk of hauntings or the supernatural is laughed off as mere superstition. On the other hand, many Christians deeply believe that the Devil is out to ensnare people into ' the occult', and some Christian writers would even warn us off of playing D&D and reading Harry Potter.

I have to be  honest, I have struggled long and hard with this question of what to make of the Bibliccal accounts of angels and demons flitting in and out of Christ's ministry. I believe, though, that the best book on the subject was ' The Mystical Quaballah' by Dione Fortune.

Although a Christian , she spent a lot of time in India, and this led her to investigate eastern , and then Western Mystical traditions, including the Jewish Quaballah, a body of lore that really repays study, in my view.

From a Quaballist point of view, God is unmanifest, dwelling in unapproachable light, but causes Creation to happen on several different levels. there is the physical plane , but also an emotional plane , and a Plane of Ideas, as well as the spiritual plane. Force on one plane is Form on another.

In brief, this means that if I think something, it has no efffect on a physical level, however, the force of my thinking takes form on a higher level. What has all thiis to do with Jesus and His miracles , I hear you ask - well, back in the 1970s, if I recall it right, there were a group of phychic reasearcher who decided to test the 'Tulpa theory' and see if they could construct a thought form, so they did. 'Tulpa' is a word meaning ' thought form '. The theory states that a human mind can construct a form on another plane and then let it act as a vessel for non physical energy.

They thought hard, concentrated and invented a fictional character called ' Philip', they gave Philip an outlandishly impossible life story so that they could never stumble upon a real person who matched him by mistake, and then they started conducting seances. Sure enough, 'Philip' came through to them. not only that but other psychics and mediums unconnected to the circle began to get Philip coming in on their sittings as well. A small number of skilled and dedicated psychic researchers had  manufactured a spiritual entity on the Astral plane, which is one level up from the material one we live on.

Now, if a small group of people can raise enough energy to construct something like that , imagine what a few thousand people could so, having their minds directed by someone conducting a magical or religious service. Arthur C.  Clarke once said that any form of technology sufficiently advanced would be indistinguishable from magic - and any form of technology that was still distinguishable had not been advanced far enough!

I should point out that when I left Jehovah's Witnesses in 1984, I went into the ' alternative politics' of the day. Thatcher was in at Number 10, Greenham Common Airbase had Cruise Missiles sitting in it and people came there to protest and link up with others opposed to Thatchers plans. . CND had a lot of members, some of whom were trade unionists and Left wingers, other were people who were into ' New Age', some were conventional Christians,  and some were into alternative forms of Spirituality, like Wicca, Astrology , Buddhism and the like.

It was there that I began to rub shoulders with such people, went to meetings run by groups who were not JWs or even Christian and eventually joined  Ashrams , or teaching circles - in fact I belonged to several such groups. As well as taking part in training exercised and group ceremonies, I was also given a lot of reading to do as homework, and was initiated to several levels in a few groups. I got to meet people who practised what some would term ' magic', and learned something about magical workings myself.

The theory is that humans have several ' energy centres' in their bodies. these are what the Hindus called 'Chakras'  - there are seven , that roughly correspond to the endocrine glands, and these are said to be linked to the seven visible planets.

Basically, if a group of people imagine a form in unison , that form can then contain all the emotional and intellectual energies that are directed towards it on the Astral Plane, and , given enough energy , it will take on a life of it's own. it will even begin to go around seeking energy to draw from.

An Astral being that is constructed out of love and good will therefore, will seek out those of a similar disposition to replenish itself, so to speak.  However, an entity made up of other emotions and ideas - something like a pagan war god, for instance, would seek out other sources of power. Hence it would be that there are several beings, up there on the Astral plane with a definite interest in seeing as much pain and misery going on down here to keep themselves going. These , I believe, were the demons that christ spent so much of His time kicking out. To be sure, some people were simply lame, blind or otherwise physically impaired, but I am convinced that some were in fact spiritually oppressed.

The fact is that Voodoo is drwn from an African word ' Voudon ', meaning ' idol' - the slaves brought to the Carribean from Africa still kept a lot of their native traditions,  and one of these was belief in the Laos. A Lao is a spirit, and it is believed that in a ceremony where there is dancing and strong, rhythmic drumming , that the worshippers enter into a kind of trance where the Laos descend and ride the dancers, like a person  would ride upon a horse.

Temporarily, during the dancing ,the Voodoo worshipper is possessed and controlled by the Lao, or Spirit. yet this is not seen as being oppressive or malevolent. The Voodoo worshipper welcomes the Lao in the same way that the Christian would seek to be controlled and inspired by the Holy Spirit, and reports the same feelings of ecstasy and being lifted up to a higher state.

So why was it different in Christ's time , and why is it different in so many cases of ' demon possession ' in our culture? Perhaps it is that our Western  minds are differently attuned, and contact a different sort of Entity. The Caribbean slaves were contacting Astral beings who were originally made when their people were free - the benevolent spirits forged by their ancestors. Not for so the people oppressed in Roman occupied Palestine, or for modern day thrill seekers who get in touch with things on the ouija board, it would seem.

The salient thing to remember is that Jesus had control of these things. Astral beings come in all shapes and sizes, but none were any match for Jesus. Nor does Christ need them to reach his people, or for they to gain contact with Him.Some may say ' If the pagan gods are just human creations, what about the God of the Bible - isn't He just another product of human thinking, simply another Tulpa ? The short answer is  " No- not exactly  - He is somewhat different, and this shows up in Scripture.' But that will do for another time, I think.  We need to examine Hebrew really closely to even try to begin to come to some sort of understanding of What god is, and then , we only have an approximation and not an exact assesment .We can never know God fully, but we can come to Know Him better.

You are free to post comments and ask questions if you wish , i have tried to cram an awful lot in here, so please seek clarification  if you want it.

A Strange Encounter.

I took this pic when I went on holiday to Israel . we were standing at the same location where Jesus was when he healed a demon possessed man. Today, the level of the lake has dropped, but one can still make out the edge of a cliff, where once, the water came right up to the foot of the precipice, it now appears further back. but this is where the Gaderene swine rushed into the sea.

This incident, like so many incidents in Christ's life were not just set in the ' long ago and far away', or 'once upon a time' . The gospel writers put in so much detail that we can accurately place the time of Christ's ministry to the years 30 to 33AD, and you can still visit the spot where Jesus meets a man who is an outcast.

According to mark, who is our earliest Gospel writer, the man says that he is possessed by many evil spirits - so many in fact that in Mark , chapter 5, when Christ asks the man his name, one of the demons answers  "My name is Legion , for there are many of us ".

Jesus orders them to leave the man, and they entreat Jesus not to destroy them and entreat him to cast them into a herd of swine instead.  Jesus does this and the swine stampede over the precipice into the sea. The man , who previously wandered among the tombs around the area, slashing himself with sharp stones and howling and shrieking, is now in his right mind and goes throughout the Decapolis and tells people about Jesus.

Of course, today , many people don't believe that evil spirits or demons exist in any real sense. Some would argue that it was simply the noise and commotion that startled the pigs and caused them to stampede over the cliff. On the other hand , there are those who take a very literal view of the Bible's account here. For them , the Devil and the Demons that he rules over are real indeed. So let us examine what Scripture says and see what conclusions we can reach.

If the first mention we get of Satan is in the book of Job , we get the demons much sooner. Genesis 6; 2 tells us that the Angels looked down from heaven and saw that the daughters of men were good looking , and they lusted after them . Now here, it does not say so explicitly, but genesis is referencing an Apocryphal work, the book of Enoch. in Enoch we get the same story , but with more detail. the Sons of God, the angels, lie with the daughters of men  and have unnatural offspring  - and they also teach the sons of men the arts and crafts, teaching them to make weapons of warfare like swords and shields. Not gunpowder weapons, you will notice. Or Greek fire, or any such things as were known in the ancient world - no, just swords and shields. You would have though that they could do better than that .

Also note that they lusted after mortal women. I have to ask why. i mean , Ii find women attractive , but I'm a human male who was biologically designed to mate with them. Why would a discarnate entity find female humans attractive? if it was sex they were after, well, rabbits have a lot more sex than humans , I reckon, and serious scientific study has revealed that woman are capable of having more intense orgasms than men - and they can have them more often! It just doesn't add up.

One suggestion is that the whole Legend of the Watchers, as found in Enoch , is simply a way for Hebrews to explain all the pagan myths around them. The Unnatural offspring are  "the Mighty Ones, the men of fame". Ok, you come across pagans who claim a mighty hero like Hercules, you say this was down to the Fallen Angels. The thing is that The Devil does not appear in this myth. The Satan/ Lucifer myth does not mesh with this one, and you would think they would, but no. Not here.

In the NT , we find that Jude and Peter reference the story themselves. ( Jude 6&7, and 2Pet. 2;4). I know that Jack Chick insists that the NT writers in the Bible do not cite Apocryphal works, but he is wrong here, as are all those who insist that the Bible is totally separate from secular sources. Just like they borrow the pagan myth of Helel ben Shachar, they now borrow Enoch and fiit the two together. Interesting , huh ?

Such people will tell you that the Flood of Noah was sent to purge the world of the angel / human hybrids called the Nephilim, and that the Angels shed their bodies of flesh and reverted to being spirits again to save themselves from drowning in the Flood. However, they were not allowed back into heaven alongside the other angels and were instead cast out from god's presence and took to living in the shadowy realms between heaven and earth. From there, they plague mankind by haunting buildings and trying to gain possession of human souls.

But the whole story sounds so implausible. No scientific evidence for a global flood, all the available evidence seems to point to a complete lack of a global catastrophe at the point when Noah was supposed to have built his ark - and as we have already discussed, the idea of sex mad angels doesn't stand up to scrutiny, nor does Satan appear involved. in Enoch , they do it off their own bat.

So what did Jesus encounter by the sea of Galilee?  What else do non biblical traditions have to tell us about evil spirits and how does this help fill in the gaps in our knowledge? before we go plunging off into the deeper waters of myth and folklore, I would like to pause and allow anyone who wishes to comment or ask questions. But the answers will be given in part 2. At least , I will try to offer what I feel may be a possible  answer to the conundrum; not only explaining what happened back there, but even attempting to explain a lot of what goes on today that we might deem ' paranormal'.  Just my own theory, mark you . However,  I would like to submit it for peer review.

In the next part, more will be revealed and the whole question wrapped up, I hope.