So in part 1 of the Terror of Demons serial essay, at least it may have seemed as such, I rambled and rambled on and on going from one unrelated thing to another unrelated thing. From St. Roch, to the definitely-not-saintly Dracunculus…something I connected with not only the core, genuine parts of the strange story of Moses’s Bronze Serpent Sitting On A Pole, but also with the health complaint that, for only about 12-14 months, troubled Roch. Actually, the Dracunculus, the fiery serpent, does not give its host any real pain until it begins to emerge from the foot or leg. And when that happens, cool the point of emergence…but not in my drinking water, if you please…then it will finally come out. The foot and leg is one thing, but the fiery serpent can also come out of other parts of the human body. If foot is Body Part Number One, and leg is Body Part Number Two, then
…they do come out of the stomach at times, also known as Body Part Number Three. But you have already noticed the other swellings on this poor chap, indicating that he has other Guinea worms about to emerge from his chest, and, if the size of the swelling on his right arm is any indicator, the Mommy of All Dracunculi is about to emerge from his arm. No wonder he has his favorite bong with him! It is strange to contemplate that certain dwellers in South Sudan actually believed that the Curse of the Fiery Worm was simply a normal part of life…a curse by a witch-doctor, punishment at the hands, or worm, of an angry god, or…and this one is the most puzzling…a bizarre waste product from the blood itself. Without Guinea worms…your blood becomes diseased. A round of infected copepods on me! The word “dracunculus” is a diminutive word derived from the Latin word…draco…and the Greek word…dracon. A similar diminutive form, this time from the Latin word…human, is the source of the English word…human. In alchemy, the diminutive form of the word was first used by Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, known by his alchemy name…Paracelsus, who is mentioned in Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein along with Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa and Albertus Magnus as alchemists who studied, but were ultimately rejected, by Victor von Frankenstein. He believed that you could produce a diminutive human…a homunculus…
The Latin diminutive was also used as a derogatory nickname for the last emperor of the Western Roman Empire. Romulus Augustus, a name as bombastic as Bombastus von Hohenheim, was also called…
…Romulus Augustulus…the Little Caesar. The interesting thing about the root word…draco (“dragon”) is that it is the root of the Romanian word…drac. That, in turn, is the…
…oranges of the Romanian word…Dracul. Both words have the same meaning…devil. Hah! You thought this digression is meaningless, but since Terror of Demons is ultimately about The Exorcist, and during Karras’s first meeting with Regan MacNeil…she referred to herself as The Devil…a serious mistake fraught with a million difficulties, yet only one big difficulty…Please let me out of the straps!...the Romanian words…drac…and…dracul are, in fact, relevant. In the 15th century, there was a crusading order called…
…the Order of the Dragon. This was a crusading order, meaning that its members were dedicated to fighting the Ottoman Turks who were attempting to conquer the Balkans. The frontline of the clash between the Christian Balkans and the jumping off point for the Turks was a small principality called…Wallachia. Wallachia was ruled by a voivode…warlord…who was a member of the Order of the Dragon…Vlad II, the son of Mircea I. The Dragons gave him the nickname…Dracul…which may be a play on the words…dragon…and…Devil. Vlad II had two sons…Vlad III…and Radu…known as Radu the Handsome. And this family takes us to…
…and now join me in the…
…hall of family portraits! Yes! After all, I’m all about family…
…oranges. Vlad III was known as… The Impaler. His father was Vlad the Devil, and his son, who was not a member of the Order of the Dragon, was given the diminutive…Vlad the Little Dracul…Vlad Dracula…the Little Devil. He is the basis of the fictional character…Dracula. So is the Dracunculus the Little Dragon, or the Little Devil? Maybe…a little of both!
The connection between worms and divine punishment is not relegated to just Little Dragons living in South Sudan or the Republic of Chad. The Dracunculus doesn’t eat human flesh. But there was the concept of Eaten By Worms in antiquity. This punishment was relegated to the worst of criminals and sinners. It befell the Roman Patrician and Brutal Dictator…
Sulla…the guy with no nose who let Caesar go and then spent the rest of his life regretting it. In reality, Sulla probably died as a result of cirrhosis of the liver, no doubt your fate if you spend 16 hours a day drinking. Herod Agrippa…
…rebelled against Rome and then decided that he could do one better…declare himself to be the messiah. It’s too bad he didn’t know that job was taken! According to the Book of Acts, Herod Agrippa fell ill and suffered from Eaten-By-Worms Disease after killing the Apostle James, brother of the Johnnites’ John. A rather horrible account exists of the death of the Roman Emperor Galerius…an extreme glutton who probably also had every venereal disease known to science, and perhaps even a few that were known only to him. As much as this left me…
…Dazed and Confused, I heard that the Galerian Beast…
…fed his enemies to his pet bear, and although he bragged about the fact that he couldn’t read or write, he worshipped his hag of a mother…Romula…who inspired in him an extreme hatred of Christians. The Great Diocletian Persecution of Christians, which Constantine’s father…
…Constantius Chlorus, having established friendly relations with Christian leaders in the territory he ruled, and so he made only the minimum amount of anti-Christian efforts that would yet satisfy Diocletian, should really be dubbed the Great Galerian and Romulaian Persecution of Christians. Why were there so many nose-less emperors? I can do you one better! Here’s a joke! What happened when the Emperor Constantine, son of Constantius Chlorus, heard what happened to his giant statue? Don’t know?
He went to pieces! Hey, Constantine…which way is up? And behold…
…the Imperial Foot! And one, or so it would seem, that is free of emerging Guinea worms. At least he has his nose! Which is something that his father’s colleague…
…Diocletian…does not. At least here.
Different suggestions have been made as to what horrible disease Galerius suffered from, but given the fact that he would issue his orders first thing in the morning and then spend the next 14 hours eating…he didn’t have a long life ahead of him anyway. Blood poisoning from gangrene originating in a burst boil in his groin region…venereal disease related or so I think…is probably the most likely cause of that which freed him from his Mortal Coil. But the story of the death of Galerius was told by Two Christian Extreme Polemicists…
…Eusebius and Lanctatius. Behold, Lactantius!
The Gloating Duo gloated over the terrible death of Galerius, and also floated the notion that Diocletian…
…committed suicide after resigning the Roman Purple to raise Roman Cabbages.
But your Highness! The empire!
Empire, Shmempire! The future lies in cabbages!
Ok, Diocletian wasn’t a snail-man. And I don’t believe that he committed suicide. Of course, you would be more than justified to regard the Clownish, Goofball-ridden Trump Administration as one of the most brazenly corrupt in American history. But even their rapacity and bilking of the American economy for the selfish enrichment of a bunch of rich buffoons worshipped as gods by so many idiotic people who need to find a real god…the Living God, which, or it would seem, they have forsaken in order to join a heathen cult of personality. It seems strange to me how enthusiastically people trade the real God in favor of men to worship…and the men they choose are idiots…
Benito Mussolini was an idiot, and was actually quoted by Trump.
…ok…
…all such men had nothing to say, so they preached hatred, violence, racism…and destroyed rather than created…everything in the universe was about them and no one, or nothing, else mattered to them. There was no room for the Unwanted Living God, whose stringent moral demands were seen as a sign of cowardice and weakness…and are seen that way in America today by people who, seeing how you can’t worship God and Caesar, have chosen Caesar, and then have the nerve to put a Bible into the hands of a statue of a Metaphorical Roman Dictator and call it done. And I will say that I have chosen not to go into Donald Trump’s Bing-Bong-Song…though it wasn’t easy to resist, seeing how readily it proves that he shares a feature common to the other clowns noted above…insanity. But if you want a human at the center of things, try not choosing a moron, whether you live in Italy in 1939, Germany in 1944, or in the Trumpian Nightmare of today. My choice, without a disgusting cult of personality of course, and keeping Yahweh Pantakrator in charge of it all… is…
…and no, she didn’t put them in cages. Now I will admit that there is nothing wrong with a little Hero Worship. Just make sure that the hero you choose is actually someone who did something heroic. So I will tell a short story about a true hero…one you’ve never heard about.
The scene is the Japanese city of Minamisanriku. It is March 11, 2011, and the largest recorded earthquake in human history occurred off the coast of Japan. The earthquake caused tsunami waves, one of which measured approximately 70 feet tall and it made its way to Minamisanriku at an amazing speed. The wave completely obliterated the city. Office workers at this building made their way to the roof. But there was a woman inside the building who, when the tsunami wave was seen moving in from the harbor, began broadcasting warnings over a loud-speaker system. Water from the wave reached such a tremendous height, known as a tsunami’s “run-up height,” that…
So yes…
…almost all of these people died.
That is the last known shot from the top of the building as the inundation finally reached the roof. It is easy to study about a 70 feet tall Tsunami wave in a somewhat detached, scholarly manner…something I am guilty of doing. It suddenly became much harder to do when I saw the faces. But the one person who is not on the roof is…
…Miki Endo. It was her voice that broadcast the warnings about the impending disaster over the loud-speaker. As the waves tore through the city, she refused to leave. She kept broadcasting warnings to the city until the wave reached the top floor of her office building. And she died. But not until she had saved the lives of an untold number of people…perhaps thousands. Approximately 1,000 people died in the tsunami…of roughly 17,700 residents. There can be no doubt that the number of people who lost their lives that day would have been far greater if it wasn’t for Miki Endo’s bravery and self-sacrifice. So if you want a hero…choose someone who did something heroic.
And I can’t resist. Sometimes people say amazing things, even though I don’t think that’s what they necessarily intended to do. And the subject of tsunamis, something I will return to in a different essay, made me remember something that I found to be amazing…
We’re sorry, we’re so sorry…we can’t do anything…please…just remember God.
Cut Putri is her name…and she said an amazing thing that speaks of hopelessness, and yet a transcendent hopefulness…all at the same time. There is nothing more impressive than a divinely inspired paradox that transcends being a mere paradox and becomes divinely-inspired transcendent paradoxical truth. And if you are dying, even in a horrible way…if it were me…to hear the words…just remember God…may be the most beautiful thing I have ever heard. On December 26, 2004, Cut Putri’s family, residents of Banda Aceh in the province of Aceh, located on the island of Sumatra, was ready for a wedding. Suddenly, the ground shook violently for 10 minutes. That is not surprising when…
…an undersea earthquake measuring 9.3 rips across the floor of the Indian ocean. Cut Putri and her family lived only 60 miles from the epicenter of one of the largest earthquakes in this planet’s history. She relates how relieved her family was to find that despite the terrible damage and death caused by the earthquake, they were all alive and well. Earthquakes are one thing…but only one thing…and one thing that in the end, will come to mean nothing. After everyone got around to feeling overjoyed that no one was hurt, they heard a very loud sound coming from the ocean. Another person on the island said that he looked toward the horizon and saw the mountain. Of course, there was no mountain…he was referring to the ocean...it had become a giant, mountain of black water. That may, I’m sure, seem like an exaggeration. Fortunately, I found a cool graphic that shows…
…what a 100 foot-tall ocean wave looks like, from the perspective of a person, car, home, or multi-story building. So it seems to me that the word…mountain…just about sums it up perfectly. Although Cut Putri lost family members in the three waves that inflicted such unprecedented destruction, the hardest part may have been hearing people crying out for help as the waves washed them past the building she was in…at a location where the inundation wasn’t quite as high of a mountain as it was elsewhere on the island, but a mountain nonetheless. Of course, she could do nothing…and all she knew to do was to tell those dying around her to…remember God. And that is a strange thing. When the waters receded and showed the true extent of the calamity…
…the mosque on Banda Aceh was the only thing that remained intact for miles and miles and miles. If this were a church, I know the kind of triumphal comments I would hear. But a church and a mosque are the same thing, and God made a very loud statement on an otherwise very fateful day. And Cut Putri was there to share it with those who needed to hear it most.
But I digress. Even Plundering Trump and all his minions pale in comparison to the way Diocletian bilked the economy of the Roman empire for his own…I’m-the-Center-Of-the-Universe selfish desires. When he decided he needed his own personal, modest abode, he stole a few denarii from the Roman people…
Hey, Trump! Try hanging your name on that one! And wasn’t Diocletian slumming it! Although he didn’t kill himself, the emperor actually became very ill before stepping down, and whatever ailed him, it had nothing to do with Wormy Purple Cabbages, and it appeared to simply grow worse over time. It may have been a severe influenza or maybe even hepatitis, either of which could have wrecked his immune system and quite possibly irreparably damaged internal organs. There is also what is obviously a fictional horror story…sorry one and all…about a young Persian soldier named Mithridates being killed “in boats” by the Persian King Artaxerxes II…a most horrible fate, if it ever existed. But I believe that it didn’t exist. There are only two sources describing the use of such a means of execution. The only one worth even a few moments of consideration is that of Plutarch. Except, there is a problem…Plutarch states that he read the story in a book written by Ctesias. Ah, yes, Ctesias!
It is not for nothing that he is known as Ctesias The Liar. Or at the least, a wholly unreliable source. He was a Greek physician from Caria in Asia Minor, who served as the personal physician to…
…Artaxeres II himself. Of course, that is a somewhat stylized depiction of the Persian king. And, I must admit, this image of the king comes from his very impressive…Carved-Into-The-Cliff Tomb…
Still, risking a horrible death in Artaxerxes’s Boats, I must say that the Persian king had a tendency to be portrayed in a Less Than Highly Stylized way…
…not to forget the strange…
…javelin-wielding ballerina pose. But this is my favorite image of Artaxerxes II…
Ctesias made up weird and bizarre stories, passing them off as something other than weird and bizarre stories. In fact, Ctesias specialized in something that would become a popular pastime in medieval Europe…creating weird creatures with which to populate one’s bestiary…
…the Pendai tribe of India, also called Panotti, who have gigantic ears, and eight fingers on both hands and eight toes on both feet. The Pendai proved very popular…
But…
Grandma! What big ears you have!
All the better to hear you, my Dear.
I like this one best, since Mr. Panotti has found an admirer from within the Bestiary…
…and he appears to be holding the Three Controllers of the Universe in his left hand, which I suppose he stole from the Basiliskian Cockatrice…
Good Heavens! Are you telling me that the universe is controlled by three Dracunculian Guinea Worms? Sorry, I have worms in my mind…I mean, on my mind. Does anyone have a stick?
But Ctesias gave us more than just the Panotti! There is the…
…unicorn. Then there is the…
…manticore. Who could forget the…
…Cynocephali…Dog-Headed People. Strangely enough, there are Dog-Headed Saints…and St. Christopher was often represented as a Cynocephalus. I also include…
…Egyptian Anubis, no doubt the source of the concept, and a werewolf or Lycanthrope…a further development of it. Yes, I am almost done. I can’t forget about the…
…Crocotta. And! My love for cephalophores…beheaded saints who walk around carrying their heads...is well-known. Well, to me at any rate. But good ole Ctesias gave us a foretaste of the feast to come! Introducing the…
Blemmyae…a race of headless people whose face is in their chest. In researching this, I became ecstatic when I found more cephalophores!
St. Livier; St. Procule; St. Valerie; St. Juthwara; St. Miliau; and St. Eliphius. Ok, so now it gets strange. One thing that all headless saints have in common, is that it was a third-party who did the beheading. But now give a warm Tektonikian welcome to the goddess…
Yes! Chinnamasta…a Tantric Goddess. Why let someone else cut your head off when you can do it yourself! First she stands on top of a couple doing the wild thing…apparently she doesn’t understand that when a couple says…let’s get a room…they aren’t inviting her. Well, unless they are, but that would be…weird. So she holds her self-severed head in one hand, the sword that she hacked off her head with in another hand, and blood spurts from her neck. Disgusting? Wait, it gets better! At least two female figures stand beside her, sometimes holding severed heads, and drink the blood that is spurting from her neck. To be even more disgusting, her severed head also drinks the blood spurting from her neck…Liquid Self-Cannibalism. And! She and her companions wear lovely necklaces made up of severed heads…
And so we have our Yucky Trio! Chinny, Tlazy, and Lamashtu. It’s interesting, and somewhat digusting, that all three are feeding others from their bodily fluids. And Lamashtu has four Guinea worms! Maybe she just pulled them out of Pazuzu’s feet with a Diabolical Stick! Actually, as I showed above, medieval bestiaries feature three snakes known as the Controllers of the Universe…hah! Lamashtu has four!
But as concerns Ctesias…why did I show all of this weird stuff? Well…partly because it’s fun. But it also makes an excellent point that we modern people need to bear in mind. We pick up a book and read something and that which we read…must be true. And it must be true if you saw it on TV! Or the internet! People have found the Scaphistic Suffering of Mithridates so intriguing that they fail to notice that in thousands of years of human history, only two authors mention it…Plutarch, and then, Jonannes Zonaras, a 12th century Byzantine writer who was simply re-writing what he read in Plutarch. And in thousands of years of human history, only one unfortunate person is named as having died in such a manner. But Plutarch got it from Ctesias. When you read ancient writers, you have to know who they are and what kind of things they wrote about. So! How confident are you in anything that Ctesias said? I’ll answer that for you. I’ve shown various strange peoples and strange beasties that fascinated Ctesias. But I’ve saved the best for last…
…the Most Bizarre Monopods, also called...Sciapods. They had one leg and one gigantic foot. A Dracunculian Dream! Typically, they lie on their back holding their giant foot in the air. And there isn’t much you can do with your giant foot sticking up in the air. Well, except to…
Protect you from the sun, though you’ll get quite a sunburn on the sole of your one, gigantic foot. If you were clever, you could find a Lady Monopod and then you could combine your legs and feet…
…although it kinda looks like there’s more going on in this piece of Monopodian Erotica. Still, Blemmyae and Monopods don’t always get along very well…
That’s a lucky shot…or unlucky shot…depending upon whether you are the Blemmy or the Monopod…ouch! I’m sure everyone is willing to laugh off Ctesias as a source, thereby realizing that there is no truth to the story Dying In Boats. Still, that shouldn’t keep you from enjoying…
…a cold can of Scaphistic Beer. So it’s clearly the case that the concept of worms being a punishment for some sort of crime or sin is well attested outside of South Sudan and the Republic of Chad.
Still, since Roch didn’t live in the Holy Land, where he most likely drank the contaminated water, then he may have only got one…or two. However many there were, once they were out…that was it. The key thing was not to try to pull it out, which may have been the mistake made by the Israelites around the Red Sea until they were shown how to use…the pole…or really…the stick. And I think it’s possible to explain why the idea was that the afflicted were being bitten by Little Fiery Serpent…i.e. the belief was that the Dracunculus was actually burning its way into your foot rather than burning its way out of your foot. This confusion about directionality is made clear in comments made about the Guinea worm by Oliver Wendel Holmes Sr…
If you think you are strong enough to bear what I am going to say,—I replied,—I will talk to you about this. But mind, now, these are the things that some foolish people call dangerous subjects,—as if these vices which burrow into people’s souls, as the Guinea-worm burrows into the naked feet of West-Indian slaves, would be more mischievous when seen than out of sight.
Thus…Confusion Of Directionality! When you suddenly feel the intense burning pain, you look down at your foot and see the Little Dragon, not getting out of your body, but burrowing its way in! This would lead to what would seem to be a rather good idea at the moment, but would eventually prove not so. Pulling the Dracunculus would break it, the rest, which could just happen to be the remaining two and one-half feet of it, would recoil back into your body, leaving most of it in you. Nowadays, if this happens it’s not the end of the world since we have something they didn’t…anti-biotics. Eventually the Israelites learned the lesson, perhaps from some passing Bedouins or local people who were well aware of what this fiery serpent really was, how you got it, and the correct course of action to remove it…stick it to the Dracunculus! And boil your water. A little Mosaic Chlorine would do just fine. I’m sure passing Bedouins or local people could probably have shown the Israelites where to obtain safe water, and which water sources to avoid, although fresh water was scarce and, being zealously guarded, became the focal point of local competition. I noted that Roch’s Great Ailment was re-cast as something else when approved manifestations of the saint were designated. I also sought to show that, Dracunculus aside, St. Joseph is a somewhat enigmatic historical person, not necessarily a carpenter at all, and certainly not an old man. If that is not the case, then he was a subsequent husband of Mary of Nazareth and respectable resident of that small town, nonetheless deceased by the time that Christ was driven out, seeing how only name-dropping-Luke, oh…and the Johannites…for what that’s worth, sought to drop his name into that context, though still not calling him a carpenter.
But one of Joseph’s most enigmatic titles is…Terror of Demons. By this I understand…a Terror To Demons…St. Joseph is a powerful saint who puts the wind up the Demons’ Skirts, as it were. They stand in fear of him. Why Joseph? If you look around, you will receive all kinds of very modern religious explanations for this. They are, in my opinion, simply explanations consistent with Systematic Theology. The real question is when Joseph first received this title and…why? What did it mean then? Systematic Theological explanations for why Joseph is a Terror To Demons would fit Mary nicely too, or any number of saints in the Enormous Universe of Spiritual-Being Good-Guys. True it is that the saint most associated with resisting Satan is…
…Michael…the one who does not fear the muscular, and strangely balding, Devil. Why isn’t he the Terror of Demons? Why is it St. Joseph? Now, the enigmatic title is encountered in the Litany of St. Joseph. But we now know that St. Roch is portrayed as having a simple boil, or gash, on his leg…whereas the real story is more earthy.
Our very own Janet Janetisky has an update for us on that pesky fiery serpent problem. Isn’t that right, Janet?
It is indeed…Chuck. Authorities from the CDC moved quickly to eradicate the new pest that had been inexplicably introduced into the United States.
Oh, really?
Yes!
…they had to really stick to it…it proved to be a long, drawn-out process. Still, they had to proceed carefully…they couldn’t just pull out all the stops. And they thought the Little Dragon had been eliminated.
What do you mean…thought? Did something happen?
Well…
Good heavens, Janet! That’s terrible!
Yes it was.
Was?
The Sukinotket Wild Copepod Hatcheries Corporation had its import license revoked.
So that dreadful witch-doctor zombie is gone now?
Well, not exactly…
A Guinea Worm museum, Janet?
Yes, Chuck. They found an Egyptian mummy that had a calcified male Dracunculus in the chest region.
Male?
Indeed. Guinea worms mate within the human body. The males are much smaller than the females. And they die after mating. Usually, the body breaks them down. In this case, the male worm found in the ancient Egyptian girl had calcified.
That’s disgusting, Janet.
This commercial break is brought to you by…
In part 1, I dealt with the subject of fiery serpents and good-ole saint Roch. I was unaware at the time that he had purchased a Sukinotket’s Super Duper Guinea Worm Elimination Angel. I suppose that beats a stick every time…and even a Nehushtan or two! Still, given the unexplained appearance of infected copepods in America’s drinking water, it’s a good idea to…
…check the legs of your friends before you wade out into your drinking water lest…
Notice that mom has one too. I have, thankfully, retired from the Dracunculus business…it’s not very popular, and so I thought I would try my hand at a new business venture, one that seemed would be right up my alley. And so I opened…
Opening day was really great!
Now, I must say…that I never saw it happen. And it’s like I told my lawyer…
…there’s no such thing as tsunamis!
Still, the only reason I can think of to explain Joseph as the Terror of Demons is that at some point, among some group of clerics of some kind, St. Joseph was a key figure in the ritual of exorcism. Since demons could not resist him, and would ultimately be defeated by him, Christ’s adopted father…well, he was a terror to them…perhaps like Pazuzu is to Lamashtu, a battle Lamashtu can never win, so too any and all demonic combatants could not prove victorious when the Quiet Man From Nazareth was present. This would suggest that Merrin believed that, during his battle on the night of the exorcism, he was facing Lamashtu. He thus showed up with two allies to fight beside him…Two Spiritual Giants …St. Joseph, Terror of Demons…and Pazuzu, Terror of Lamashtu...
Welcoming Pazuzu? I have stated my opinion several times on this point. The painful groans and shrieks are NOT Regan welcoming Pazuzu. And! What we see in this shot is NOT actually happening in the Artificial Reality. This is a hallucination seen by Merrin. It signals, within the Mind Of Merrin, that the exorcism is about to reach a successful conclusion. Victory is at hand! Lamashtu has lost, and she will soon return back to the Void Of Diabolical Spirit-Beings Who Have Been Defeated. That’s one hellava of demonic-entity fall! So she screams in pain in the face of defeat. But as it stands, it wasn’t a fair fight. She stood alone in a great battle with the Terror of Demons and Pazuzu, Defender of Babies and Young Children. How fortunate it is that the Quiet Father of Nazareth was present. True…he was not paired with Humbaba’s Little Brother per se. But he was there, and so was Pazuzu. So Lamashtu never stood a chance. And she would be shown no quarter. Of course, that was NOT what was happening. Merrin’s contextualization of what was happening was wrong. I should qualify that. Wrong…factually within the Artificial Reality. But for the Gentle Man of God…well…he couldn’t have been more right. So Merrin’s most important contribution on that Very Strange Night was bringing with him the Ultimate Spiritual Defenders, not performing an interesting, but irrelevant, medieval ritual. But how is it that Merrin brought the Quiet Father of Nazareth with him? Can I qualify that? Ah…yes…I think I can.
The history of exorcism is as old as Christianity itself, though the story of the Moonstruck Boy shows that the casting out of demons was really the healing of illnesses, believed to be the result of Malevolent Spirit Entities. Christians may experience a tad bit of embarrassment when reading John 5: 1-9. This story tells of a Magic Pool of Water…one, or so I think, that was free of infected copepods. People who were sick would lie around this pool of water, located near Bethesda, also known as the Sheep Gate, within in the city of Jerusalem. Why do that?
…and they waited for the moving of the waters. From time to time an angel of the Lord would come down and stir up the waters. The first person who waded into the pool after each time this happened would be cured of whatever disease he had.
In most Bibles, this bizarre statement will appear in a footnote, and not in the actual text. Some ancient manuscripts have it in the text, while others don’t. The same is true of the second, somewhat embarrassing second ending of the Gospel of Mark. The passage in John, which of course appears nowhere else, does not simply relate a silly superstition. No, it is written as though this were a fact…when we know it can not be a fact…because no such thing can happen. That said, I would note that the concept and symbolic importance of water is quite prominent in the Johannite Document. So it would have been nigh impossible to resist including this strange claim. I believe it is original to the document. Manuscripts that don’t have it have been redacted by those embarrassed by the claim. The importance of water also runs through the Apocalypse of Adam. This book includes several different virgin-birth myths, all of which are probably unknown to most Christians, who would no doubt take offense at them. Well, I should qualify that…those who use the Apocalypse of Adam did not find them offensive, and it is very illuminating to learn that what is in Matthew and Luke was not the only such myths in circulation. Each little story ends with…
…and thus he came to the water…
But the claims of exorcisms in the Gospels themselves saddled Christianity with belief in the indwelling of demons and a means of casting them out. Prior to the Roman Rite of Exorcism, the original Exorcisers were the Benedictines.
That is St. Benedict holding a scroll that says…Vade Retro Satana! In Latin, it means…Get Back Satan! This is rather similar to something Jesus yelled at Satan, who was not originally named in the Gospel of Mark. I have stated my opinion that the original idea was that Jesus went into the wilderness as the Great Scapegoat to face, and defeat, Azazel. In the ancient ritual, the scapegoat would be killed and devoured by Azazel. This would satisfy him, and he would leave the ancient…Don’t Pull the Guinea Worm Out Israelites...alone. And for those who regard the Bible as a holy relic, the Book of Numbers claims that this bizarre ritual was devised by God. And so I will paraphrase…
Vade Retro Azazel!
Christ was the only Scapegoat to enter the wilderness and return victorious. He defeated the Mysterious Dark and Malevolent Forces that Azazel represents. This victory presaged his ultimate victory…
…in dying, he defeated death…
And his perfect, sinless life after his baptism and receiving of the Holy Spirit made him the only one human in history to be the Great Scapegoat who takes upon himself the sins of those who follow The Way. So…
…in dying as the sinless scapegoat, he defeated sin…
What exactly does Christ say during this tete-a-tete between the Once Azazel But Now Satan and Jesus of Nazareth?
Jesus said to him…Away from me, Satan! For it is written…worship the Lord your God and serve only him!
Jesus will later direct this statement against Peter as recorded in Matthew 16:23…
Get behind me Satan! You are a hinderance to me and do not care about the things of God!
Certainly this expresses one of the underlying principles in the Great Dualism. I have suggested elsewhere that the original idea underlying the tempting in the wilderness is not a battle against Satan. I believe in its original form, it was intended to symbolize the metaphorical battle between Christ and Azazel…Christ is the Ultimate Scapegoat who defeats the One Who Consumes the Scapegoat. The Vade Retro Satana incantation is first met with in a 1415 Benedictine manuscript found in Metten Abbey, Bavaria. But the phrase pre-dates the Benedictines’ use of it. The phrase Vade Retro Satana is found in a manuscript containing Psalm 52, which is dated to the first quarter of the 13th century, no later than 1220..
Satan needs a nose-job! It is set, of course, in the context of the Jesus vs. Satan struggle. The Benedictine incantation, in full, is as follows…
Let the Holy Cross be my light; let me not be guided by the dragon!
Step Back, Satan! Never tempt me with empty things!
You offer only evil..drink the poison yourself!
Before the manuscript was found in the Benedictine Abbey in Metten, only the initials of the incantation were known…they appear on the reverse of the Seal of the Benedictines…
It was after the discovery of the manuscript in Metten that the full text of the abbreviation of the slogan became known. Another manuscript with the incantation dating to 1340 features Satan tempting Saint Benedict…
…by offering him a drink from a Diabolical Cup. The idea of the Cup of Poison isn’t new. It owes his oranges…sorry…origins…to the Execution of…
…Socrates, who was forced to drink a Cup Of Poison as the means by which the Athenian death-sentence against him was carried out. The bizarre second ending to the Gospel of Mark, by which I mean to say…Primitive Mark, which originally ended where the original ending ended, includes a reference to being bitten by poisonous serpents…by which I will assume we are not talking about Poisonous Guinea Worms…and drinking poison and coming out of it just fine. In the apocryphal Acts of John, a Johnnite document written by those who thought that the Johnnite Document didn’t go far enough in the struggle with the Peterites, a book that lacks all traces of Dracunculi but does feature the apostle conversing with a Bed Bug, John proves that he is the true disciple…or fictionally known as…the Beloved Disciple…the Disciple Jesus Loved…the Disciple Jesus Loved Better Than Peter…so there! What was I saying? Oh, yes! John proves this by…
…drinking a Cup of Poison. And unlike the unfortunate Socrates, he doesn’t so much as belch. The poisonous serpent, added to Primitive Mark with the drinking-poison-silliness, I believe was added by followers of Paul…the Self-Appointed Apostle, who nonetheless dreamed up a clever call narrative to “prove” that he, like the others, was personally chosen by Christ when he was, in fact, not, and instead…helped to kill St. Stephen, thus creating Christianity’s first martyr. But! And I have come to feel compelled to work in references to the Infancy Gospel of Thomas whenever I can…guided by the Spirit of St. Zeno of course…which leads me to state that in that document, Jesus’s brother James, later James the Just, Brother of the Lord, and leader of the Jewish-Christians in Jerusalem, was bitten by a poisonous snake, and Little Boy Jesus, temporarily halting his rampage in Nazareth, saved his brother’s life.
Still, the Benedictine ritual must not have been the only ritual of exorcism. It seems very difficult to believe that there was not a ritual of exorcism that called upon St. Joseph, in his manifestation as…The Terror of Demons.
The St. Joseph medal featured in The Exorcist is particularly important for one basic reason. What is that? The very design answers a question often asked…how many St. Joseph medals appear in the movie? I think there can be only one answer to that question.
The medal featured in the movie is a design by Denis Fernand PY (1887-1949). He was a French designer and engraver who produced highly unorthodox, art-nouveau, art-deco styles and designs.
What is particularly interesting is that his St. Benedict medal, which features the abbreviations of the Get Back Satan motto, shows a slight similarity to that of the St. Joseph medal…
…the position of the legs is almost identical. Now I will make an over-generalization that nonetheless holds true, as far as I am concerned. In the same way that St. Roch traded his Guinea Worm for a Black Death Boil as a result of Rome’s attempt to re-image saints and establish a more-or-less uniform, and accepted, presentation, the orthodox St. Joseph icon came to achieve a remarkable degree of consistency.
That is not to say that there weren’t PY-like deviations from this basic presentation. But most people who know well the Basic Saint Joseph of Nazareth medal will not recognize those that fall outside of those parameters…
In that manifestation, he looks a bit too much like Abraham Lincoln for my taste. The next one I definetly don’t like, due to the positioning of his left hand, which is shown grasping his hammer, is this one…
…not to mention the fact that it looks like he got punched in the eye…which is exactly where Regan punched Chris. The next medal….
…seems to look a bit too much like Socrates for my image of St. Joseph. The next non-standard St. Joseph truly troubles me….
I suppose I have been commenting on The Exorcist far too long when the eye on the medal reminds me of…
I would add that, as a keen observer of Regan’s sleepwear, the pretty blue flowers make this her most beautiful night-dress. And…
And…
And before I am yet again labelled as the Great Religious, Theological, and Spiritual Dracunculus who is Well Beyond the Pale, I should assert that Regan’s eyes roll back in her head in only 2 scenes. In the first scene, her pretty teeth are still as white-as-white can be…until Chris hallucinates and sees them change. In my essay titled….Shimmer, I showed conclusively that it is only in the mind of Chris, and then, by proxy, of Karras, that Regan’s teeth show the most perplexing back-and-forth between beautiful, pretty bad, and downright disgusting. In reality, Regan’s teeth never changed. And as I will further argue in subsequent installments to the essay series…The Shadow Among Us, there is a perfectly rational explanation for the rolling back of the eyes into the head that fits well with a non-demonic explanation…and one that fits nicely with the only possible explanation for the very non-demonic appearance of Regan’s lips as the movie progresses. Ah, yes! Both have the exact same, far more realistic, explanation. So don’t go to Nazareth and tell the Quiet Man of Nazareth what I said about the Creepy St. Joseph Medal…after all…I don’t know how Zeno fell off the roof! That said, I’m sure I’m headed for my own Hellava-Fall-From-Somebody’s-Religious Roof; though I’m sure that a little kid from Nazareth won’t be the one who pushed me off. And as I sink below a Metaphorical 100 Foot Spiritual and Theological Tsunami Wave, the only thing I can think to do is…
…just remember God.