I am NOT a fan of horror films in general, and I am especially not a fan of horror films involving daemons, possession, and exorcism. In fact, before I became a Christian, I remember listening to my 6th-grade homeroom teacher – this was approximately 300 years ago, yet my memory of his words remains to this day – talking about watching The Exorcist, and he said that he came home and was frightened out of his wits by it, because he read that daemons can really get you if you are a believer in Christianity. Now that I’ve become a believer, I know that this simply is not true – I’ll get to that later – but that sentiment certainly stuck in my mind for many years, and is one of the reasons why I struggled mightily against the call of Christ. I didn’t want to get involved with anything related to what I considered supernatural mumbo-jumbo – and at the time, I considered talk of daemons and spiritual possession to be extra JUMBO mumbo-jumbo.

Basically, I was in one of those odd situations where I didn’t believe in ghosts, daemons, and paranormal activities – but I was scared shitless of them.

Yet there I was the other day, in a movie theatre, watching The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It. (Long story. Involves a member of the female half of the species. Yet another reason why women ruin everything – especially a man’s “ME-time”.)

Popcorn Flicking

Here is the trailer to the movie, in case you are interested:

Now, as horror movies go – and I’m hardly a connoisseur of the genre – it was pretty decent, I suppose, and genuinely terrifying in certain places. Essentially, the movie focuses on the Glatzel possession case and its immediate aftermath, particularly the story of Arne Johnson. Mr. Johnson was present at the exorcism of young Jonathan Glatzel, and supposedly invited the daemon in the little boy. The daemon in question gladly jumped into him and took control of him, and proceeded to drive him out of his mind. Eventually, he stabbed his landlord to death in a frenzied attack. In court, he claimed that he was under unholy compulsion to kill – essentially, the Devil made him do it.

As far as I can tell, it is at roughly this point that the movie departs significantly from “real life”, insofar as anything about Ed and Lorraine Warren can be considered “real” – because apparently they were serial fraudsters and shysters of the highest order. The film goes into considerable detail about an occultist daughter of a fallen Catholic priest and daemon-hunter, who goes horribly astray and starts seeking out the dark arts. These sinister things twist and corrupt her, to the point where she summons a daemon out of Hell, against its will, and sends it into the world with promises of souls to collect and take back to the Underworld.

The movie, on its own, is a good spine-chilling popcorn flick, perhaps. But it also has some interesting lessons to teach us about the daemonic realm – if only inadvertently.

Lessons from a REAL Exorcist

Before we go on, it is worth watching and listening in full to this fascinating interview with a genuine Catholic exorcist – one of the few left:

And here is a good clip (warning – Aussie TV show, hence manifest stupidity):

There are a number of powerful lessons that we as Christians can and MUST take to heart from Fr. Lampert’s testimony. These lessons will allow you to discern what is true, and what is not, in a world built on lies and daemonic nonsense.

1. Daemons are Absolutely Real and Absolutely Deadly

The first and most important thing that you need to understand is that the daemonic realm is ABSOLUTELY REAL. This is nearly impossible for the secular, scientifically trained mind to accept – and yet, if you watch the video clips in that interview above, you will see people doing things that are simply not explicable through the laws of physics. The daemonic realm exists beyond our ability to perceive it, but it is real.

Too many supposedly “Christian” denominations refuse to accept that daemons exist – apparently the Baptists are particularly bad in this regard, or so I am told. (I don’t have the first actual clue about what the various denominations believe on the subject – as far as I am concerned, arguments between denominations about what the Scriptures actually say, have all of the maturity and grace of a cafeteria food-fight.) Christian Scientists – who are kind of like Grape Nuts, as Pastor John Macarthur likes to say, in that they are neither Christian nor Scientists – deny the very concept of Original Sin, and by implication they deny the realities of daemonic existence and possession.

Yet daemons definitely exist. They are quite real, and extremely dangerous. They can take over human bodies and minds and make you do things and behave in ways that will shock and terrify you.

However, the movies tend to get quite a lot wrong in terms of what they are capable of doing with humans. Daemons cannot simply possess you because they feel like it – they have to be invited into you, either by others, or by you, if you are fool enough to permit them into you. And exorcisms don’t happen in the space of a single night – they can take days, weeks, months, even YEARS.

Hollyweird does get some other things right. Daemons can definitely inflict physical harm upon people. Their very presence in a human host is pure torture for that poor soul. They can, and do, drive you to madness and despair and horrible acts of self-destruction. Exorcisms do often result in vast amounts of bodily fluids being expelled – in quite disgusting ways.

The one thing that Hollyweird constantly gets wrong is that daemons can’t do anything without direct permission from a human agent – either from a host, or from someone who wishes to inflict curses upon someone else.

Always remember that the ultimate aim of the daemons is to make you reject God, Truth, and salvation. They bask in your pain, humiliation, and fear. And they thrive upon your inability to deal with their tortures.

Fortunately, this also tells us exactly how to defeat them as well, because:

2. Daemons Fear ONLY Jesus

There is an old joke among Christian circles about how, the moment shit gets daemonic, you always go calling the Catholics. And that is absolutely true.

It is interesting to note that most cultures around the world have some understanding – usually quite poor – of the daemonic realm. The Muzzies do believe in daemons – or jinn, as they call them – and quite rightly fear them. But they have no idea how to deal with daemons, because their entire religion is completely fake and man-made, and as such, they have no ability to cast them out.

In Islamic countries, when families fear daemonic possession or oppression or hauntings of any kind, they typically go to their local mullah or imam. Said worthy will usually charge the family a significant fee to come in and exorcise the nasties in residence – but they almost always fail, because all they can do is recite passages from the Koran. Daemons have no fear whatsoever of the Koran – it is a man-made book and one that was in all probability inspired by a daemonic presence in and of itself. So the hauntings and possessions do not stop. Many of their attempts to force daemons out of people amount to little more than torture:

It is usually at that point that a desperate Muslim family will call in a Christian to help. And the Christian simply prays from the heart, and invokes the name of Our Lord and King, Jesus Christ of Nazareth. The very name of Jesus is power incarnate, and if you recite His holy name in the presence of daemons, the very air will seem to twist around you as the sound of His name hits them. They are genuinely TERRIFIED of Jesus Christ, because He had complete power and mastery over them.

We, as Christians, have sacred and awesome power in our hands – yet it is not ours. We derive it from the magnificence and glory of the one true Son of God, who took on flesh and became a man. He died for us in pure agony upon the Cross, and three days later He smashed down the Gates of Hell itself and defied the Prince of this world to rise again from the dead.

It is for these reasons that daemons flee from His very presence – and that is why a man of firm faith and real conviction, who loves the Lord and all of His glorious works, can stand against all of the hordes of Hell itself, and prevail.

As I stated above, I used to think that only Christians could be possessed by daemons, based on mistaken information. That is simply not true. Anyone can be possessed or oppressed by daemons – but Christians have a real fighting chance against them and are far better protected, especially if we live in a state of grace, do our level best not to sin, confess when we have sinned and beg God for forgiveness, and maintain a deep and unshakeable faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.

3. They Have to be Invited In

In the movie referenced above, the poor schmuck who tried to spare his girlfriend’s brother from daemonic possession, did so by freely inviting the daemon in Jonathan Glatzel into his body.

THIS IS BEYOND IDIOTIC. It is practically suicidal behaviour.

Contrary to what the Satanic paedophiles who operate in Hollyweird would have you believe, daemons don’t just wake up one morning and decide to invade your body and your mind. They are like diseases, but of the soul and spirit rather than of the body.

If you are familiar with the long war between germ and terrain theory, then you will know that Louis Pasteur, one of the fathers of germ theory, long argued that germs are responsible for all of our ills and that sterilisation of the body and its surroundings was key to human health. But he was wrong, and many of his greatest experiments “proving” his theory turned out to be massive frauds. In fact, on his deathbed, he uttered the words, “the microbe is nothing, the terrain is everything!” – thereby ceding that his rivals, who promoted a holistic approach to health, were right all along.

The same is true for daemons. Only you, or someone else, can invite them into your life. And you can do so by polluting your spiritual environment.

How do you do this? By associating with evil people, and by selling your soul in little pieces. That is always how it happens. You start off by giving in to small temptations, which then snowball into bigger and worse ones – until one day you have to pay the ultimate price and sell your whole soul, and by that point you won’t even recognise yourself.

The cool kids around the corner will invite you to hang out with them, drink, smoke, and watch porn. Then they will invite you to do drugs. Over time they will graduate to sexual degeneracy. Not at all coincidentally, daemons are attracted to people whose souls and spirits gutter and flicker like candle-flames in the winds of temptation. That is why they so often attack people with drug addictions and substance abuse issues.

It is also possible to become possessed through curses inflicted upon you by others. This is a particularly evil and diabolical (literally) way of hurting someone. Curses can manifest themselves through idols and totems in your home, unclean foods that you consume, and direct spoken words upon you. There is vast evil in this world, and there are a great many evil people who are not above hurling curses upon those that they hate in order to make them suffer. Just as daemons are real, so too are witches and warlocks.

Daemons also can, and do, attack children, simply because children are spiritually weak and underdeveloped – for the same reason that viruses attack people with underdeveloped or compromised immune systems. It is the same basic mechanism at work, though, again, the daemonic realm operates to infect the soul and spirit, while microorganisms attack the body.

The best way to avoid this infestation is similar to the best way to avoid catching some ‘orrible respiratory bug – which is to say…

4. Avoid the Occult and Stay Clean

The LEGENDARY Sir Christopher Lee’s list of accomplishments in his storied and amazing life are too lengthy to list in anything like a reasonable amount of space and time. We’d be sitting here until the Rapture trying to explain how big of a badass he was. Rumours that his funeral casket had to be carried by a forklift, due to the fact that each one of his testicles was the size of a church bell and made ENTIRELY out of solid titanium, are unconfirmed at this point.

However, rumours that the great man had one of the world’s largest libraries of occult books are entirely incorrect, as he himself pointed out:

Dracula’s Saruman’s The Man with the Golden Gun’s Lord Summerisle’s Charlemagne’s Sir Christopher Lee’s statements regarding the occult are absolutely correct. DO NOT DABBLE IN THAT SHIT. You WILL lose your mind, and you WILL then lose your soul.

In this regard, the movie I mentioned at the top of this post is actually accurate. The antagonist in it is the daughter of a priest, who stumbles across her father’s large library of occult artefacts, and delves far too deeply into them. They end up twisting her mind and corrupting her soul, and she commits the most unspeakably horrific acts using them.

Understand, here and now, that occult symbols and signs have real power. Words and symbols mean things. They have weight and force. Baphomet idols and inverted pentagrams and witch’s circles are genuinely powerful artefacts that open into the spiritual and daemonic realms. Do not mess with them.

You must also understand, very clearly, that THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS “WHITE” MAGIC. ALL real magic, of any kind – and I’m not talking about illusions and sleight of hand here, but of real magic involving ritual sacrifices and spells – is genuinely Satanic. There is no distinction between “good” and “bad” here – it’s ALL bad. STAY. THE. F**K. AWAY. FROM. IT. Don’t dabble in it, don’t experiment with witchcraft or Wicca or Druidism, and don’t open up your mind to such plainly evil ideas.

Likewise, STAY THE F**K AWAY from things like Ouija boards. These are extremely dangerous and you must never get involved with them. They ARE an effective way of connecting to the daemonic realm, and they DO work. But if you ask daemons to guide your hands, they will gladly assault you and enter your life in ways that you cannot anticipate and will not understand.

Transcendental meditation – and “New Age” philosophy and thinking in general – is also damned foolish and quite dangerous. The idea behind transcendental meditation is that you must open your mind up to the Universe and become “one” with it. Well, given that we live in a world influenced and controlled by daemons, chances are pretty high that if you open up your mind to anything, sooner or later, something is going to find its way in – and you almost certainly will not like whatever that is.

Stand Firm in the Faith

Brothers, the daemonic realm is real. Do not be fooled in this regard. As someone much wiser than me once said, the greatest trick that the Devil ever played was to convince the world that he doesn’t exist. He does, and he thrives on our pain, suffering, and sin – because he himself is sinful, prideful, and monstrously evil.

But his power is actually limited – vast and terrible though it is. We are nothing but dust and playthings to him, yet we can channel through ourselves a Power so vast, so astonishing, and so irresistible that Satan is utterly broken before it. That Power is the grace and peace granted to us by the Lamb of God, who died on the Cross for us and took our sins upon Himself. He died so that we would not have to – and then He rose again from the dead, to prove to us that sin itself is not eternal and can be overcome.

Satan, the great Adversary, the Deceiver, has never recovered from that defeat. He knows that his time is limited. His objective right now is not to break the world to his will – it is simply to maximise collateral damage before his inevitable and final defeat.

That is why we see such a dramatic rise in daemonic activity in this world, and that is why we must guard ourselves against it.

Pray often, with sincerity and faith. Appeal to God for help. Invoke the one name that the daemons fear – the name of Christ Jesus Himself. Do not be afraid – for although daemons can do great harm, they cannot resist the strength and force of Our Lord’s holy name. Keep yourself and your garments clean, as Scripture tells you to do. Give the daemonic realm as little as possible to play with.

Sanctify and purify yourself – and in the process, you will sanctify and purify those around you.

God be with you – and when He is with you, nothing can stand against you, because nothing can stand against Him.