Halloween, Witches, Demons, and the Occult

by Kathryn Marcellino, OCDS

With Halloween right around the corner, we might ask ourselves if demons and evil spirits are real? The Church gives us an authoritative answer in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CC 414) which says, “Satan or the devil and the other demons are fallen angels who have freely refused to serve God and his plan. Their choice against God is definitive. They try to associate man in their revolt against God.”

If you ever wondered if demons are just an old-fashioned notion that intelligent modern people don’t believe in nowadays, or just a literary convention, you might be interested in reading a couple of somewhat hair-raising books called Interview With an Exorcist: An Insider’s Look at the Devil, Demonic Possession, and the Path to Deliverance by Fr. Jose Antonio Fortea and also An Exorcist Tells His Story by Fr. Gabriele Amorth. These books are very revealing live encounters with demons today by credible sources (i.e. priests who are exorcists) and give a lot of information on how to protect ourselves from evil spirits and what demons can and cannot do.

Since we are in spiritual warfare while here on earth, it makes sense to know more about our spiritual enemies so that we can be better prepared to battle them (without really focusing on them, or being obsessed, or overly-frightened of them or blaming everything on evil spirits.)

For example, did you know that angels and demons cannot read our thoughts unless we direct our attention to them with the idea of communicating with them? Did you know that there are people who are possessed today and what it takes to gain deliverance from evil spirits, curses, etc.? Did you know that there are other forms of demonic oppression besides just possession?

Some dangerous things to avoid include spells, charms, curses, witchcraft, ouija boards, seances and anything having to do with the occult. These kinds of things, some of them innocently done at children’s parties, are not only strictly forbidden by the Catholic faith, but dangerous, in that they open us up to evil spirits, which are real and not just imaginary. Please don’t ever let your children/teens attend parties (especially popular at slumber parties) where there are seances and ouija boards and/or playing with spells and witchcraft. Ask beforehand what will be done at before allowing your children to attend parties. Witchcraft and spells are becoming more popular due to books and movies and somehow we need protect our children from these dangers of without getting them fascinated with them or making them seem interesting to them.

More from the Catechism of the Catholic Church on “Divination and Magic”

2115: God can reveal the future to his prophets or to other saints. Still, a sound Christian attitude consists in putting oneself confidently into the hands of Providence for whatever concerns the future, and giving up all unhealthy curiosity about it. Improvidence, however, can constitute a lack of responsibility.

2116: All forms of divination are to be rejected: recourse to Satan or demons, conjuring up the dead or other practices falsely supposed to “unveil” the future. Consulting horoscopes, astrology, palm reading, interpretation of omens and lots, the phenomena of clairvoyance, and recourse to mediums all conceal a desire for power over time, history, and, in the last analysis, other human beings, as well as a wish to conciliate hidden powers. They contradict the honor, respect, and loving fear that we owe to God alone.

2117: All practices of magic or sorcery, by which one attempts to tame occult powers, so as to place them at one’s service and have a supernatural power over others – even if this were for the sake of restoring their health – are gravely contrary to the virtue of religion. These practices are even more to be condemned when accompanied by the intention of harming someone, or when they have recourse to the intervention of demons. Wearing charms is also reprehensible. Spiritism often implies divination or magical practices; the Church for her part warns the faithful against it. Recourse to so-called traditional cures does not justify either the invocation of evil powers or the exploitation of another’s credulity.”

What is the attraction?

Why do people get attracted to using witchcraft and/or the occult practices? The answer is usually that they are seeking some sort of power, control, or some kind of hidden knowledge of the other world or the future… in other words to have some of the power that generally belongs to God. This is a temptation. The serpent in the Garden of Eden tempted Eve and said, “…you will be like gods…” (Genesis 3:5); however, when doing what the devil said she didn’t become like God, but rather lost all God’s blessings. Reality is that we are creatures and whereas God did give us some power, it is limited and we are dependent on God for all we are and have.

Good angels also truly exist like our guardian angels. St. Michael, the Archangel, and the other good angels battle with Satan and the evil spirits. The name “Michael” means “who is like God” (implying that no one is like God in contrary to Satan’s temptation.) Our guardian angel helps protect us from spiritual and natural dangers.

If you are interested in scary movies and ghosts and goblins and want the real story about demons etc. you might be interested to read first hand accounts and conclusions by the two Catholic priests-exorcists mentioned earlier, as sometimes the truth is even stranger and more scary than fiction.

However if we keep ourselves in God’s grace we really have nothing to fear as the devil cannot coerce us to sin. God does limit the power the devil has over us, and we are not allowed to be tempted more than God gives us the grace to resist. The devil can only do what God allows or we allow him to do. Let’s refuse to cooperate voluntarily with the devil and refuse to open ourselves up to evil spirits by occult practices. There really is a hell and evil spirits, and we don’t want to spend eternity there, so let’s not have anything to do with the occult while here on earth.

If we have been involved in something occult-related, we should go to confession, and if necessary, learn more about how to be delivered from any lingering effects through prayers of deliverance. In the rare instance that possession is suspected, exorcism should only be attempted by someone who is authorized by the Church. (Regular people should not attempt something like this on their own.) Wearing blessed medals, scapulars, holy water, and other sacramentals are also helpful when used with faith in God and not as a superstition.

Halloween in our secular culture is associated with witches, ghosts, evil spirits, demons, etc. but is it really the feast of All Saints Day and this is where the name derives (i.e. All Hallows Eve). Whereas it is good to know the devil exists and evil spirits so we can stay away from them, for the most part we should really keep our focus mainly on God and good things like the Bible tells us to do.

Kathryn is a member of the Secular Order of Discalced Carmelites and runs a web site with a familiar name – Catholic Spiritual Direction

Monsters vs. Monstrance – More Thoughts on Halloween

by Mark Shea Friday, October 29, 2010 Published with Permission National Catholic Register

Come Sunday, we all celebrate Halloween again, that strange night of the year when, with one accord, American civilization dredges up all its darkest fears of the supernatural and waffles between scaring itself and laughing at the whole thing—nervously.

It’s an odd thing really.  Halloween urges upon us a particular *kind* of fear.  Nobody associates fear of terrorism, or a rise in prices, or dogs, or bullies, or cancer with Halloween.  It’s ghosts, demons, witches, and all that sort of fear that our culture plays around with. We sense, somehow, that there are deeper terrors and evils in the world than just muggers or other workaday fears like unemployment.  We whistle past the graveyard 364 days a year and then, on this one night, we run up to the door of the crypt, ring the bell, and run away.  To be sure, much of the business is good clean fun, what with running around visiting the neighbors, getting candy and bobbing for apples.  But there’s also that other side of it, that makes people surf the web looking for creepy “Tales of the Unexplained” that are found, not on the fiction pages, but on those sites that relate some weird story of a haunting or other paranormal event with straight-faced “just the facts, ma’am” sobriety that insists the thing really happened.  It’s the night where people—even jolly happy godless secularists—take a moment and wonder if, really, after all, there might just be something to this whole “supernatural” thing.

It’s not an unreasonable starting place, particularly if you don’t have the good fortune to have been raised in the Church.  I remember a girl in high school who was greatly troubled by whether or not God existed.  She had a dream in which she met a vampire and was greatly relieved because she realized that if supernatural evil existed, then the supernatural good who is God could too.  And when we look at our world and the sort of evil that can occur—piles of human ash as big as a house at Maidanek—the notion of supernatural evil doesn’t look all *that* outrageous, particularly when we look at the fascination the occult held for the people who were the architects of the Nazi project.  Not for nothing did Pius XII say that Hitler was “diabolical”.

Jesus confirms this intuition by confronting not mere sickness or sin, but the demonic powers behind such evils.  He does not simplistically state that a sick person had it coming due to sin (indeed, he goes out of his way to destroy such assumptions).  And he denies, with emphasis, that those to whom bad things happen are somehow extra sinful.  But he does affirm that evils in this world are aided and abetted by the devil, that Satan can hold us “bound” in sickness as in sin, and that there are such things as demons (i.e. supernatural intelligences called “angels” which have abused their freedom and set themselves as enmity with God and man).

The vast panoply of scary creatures the human imagination has concocted to express our fears reflects this awareness that there is some deeper and more ancient evil behind mere human evil.  Always at the shadowy edge of human evil is the awareness that it trails off into a darkness where something is breathing: something that hates us and wills our destruction.  We call such things “monsters” in our art, and the interesting thing is that “monster” is a word related to both “monstrance” and “demonstrate”.  That is, a “monster” is a thing that shows forth in visible form something Horrible for all to behold, just as the Monstrance shows forth in visible form something Beautiful for all to behold.

We make monsters because it is our nature as sub-creators in the image and likeness of God to do so.  We create, as He does, in our image and likeness and dredge up out of ourselves different faces to show us who we are.  When God made us, he made us innocent and without sin, pure as He is.  But when we fell and chose to trust the word of the Ancient Dragon, who is called the Devil and Satan, we allowed into our souls things that are the stuff of nightmares.  In our art, we give these things body in order to face our fears, not only of what we are, but of what lies behind our fall.  Through those stories we discover again our capacity for evil—and the possibility of resisting it by grace.

The Faith presents this to us in stark form in the form of what the Didache calls the Two Ways: the Way of Light and the Way of Darkness.  It’s what Jesus calls the broad and the narrow way and it boils down to this: the Monster or the Monstrance.

Art Credit: Painting by Jamie Wyeth entitled, “Pumpkins in the Library”

Laughing at Lucifer in Lent

In 1942 C.S. Lewis published one of his most enduring and endearing books. The Screwtape Letters is a collection of imaginative epistles from a senior devil to his junior colleague, outlining how he should handle his “patient.” Lewis wrote the book as a series of essays for The Guardian newspaper and confessed that the pieces were not fun to write.

Over the years Lewis’ Luciferian letters have become ever more popular. In 2003 the Fellowship for the Performing Arts created a stage adaptation of Screwtape. It ran for 11 weeks in New York City and is now on a national tour. Walden Media, which produced The Chronicles of Narnia films, has promised a film version, and various famous actors have recorded audio versions of the book — the most recent being Andy Serkis, who plays Gollum in The Lord of the Rings movies. (This audiobook is sold by the Register’s sister company, Circle Press, at CirclePress.org.)

Lewis’ classic has also spawned a subgenre of books. Peter Kreeft wrote The Snakebite Letters. Randy Alcorn has written two books, Lord Foulgrin’s Letters and The Ishbane Conspiracy. Screwtape has been featured in a Bono music video and the cartoon strip “Calvin and Hobbes,” and there has even been a Mormon book written in the same style.

Lewis didn’t apologize for the fact that Screwtape Letters is an entertaining and amusing read. Indeed, in the opening pages, he quotes Martin Luther and St. Thomas More on the need to take Lucifer lightly. Luther wrote, “The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn.”

For his part, St. Thomas More said: “The devil … that proud spirit … cannot endure to be mocked.”

A few years ago, on my blog, I started writing some of my own Luciferian letters for Lent. I found the exercise to be fascinating and frightening fun. It was a challenge to see things from the devil’s point of view. Eventually, I fleshed out the letters and added a plotline that begins on Shrove Tuesday and finishes on Easter Day.

What I came to realize as I wrote was that Luther and St. Thomas More were right: One of the best ways to battle against the devil is to mock him. Books in the tradition of The Screwtape Letters do just that.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that we dismiss the devil or underestimate his power. What it does mean is that we engage in the battle with a sense of humor and a sense of proportion.

We are not mocking the spiritual battle but, rather, the pride and vanity of one who thinks himself the highest while he is really the lowest.

Of course we must take sin seriously. The reality of the devil must be admitted, and, especially during Lent, we must enter the spiritual battle wearing our full armor. All I am suggesting is that part of that armor should be the swift arrows of good humor and humility.

Laughing at Lucifer is a good way to do just that.

Laughing at Lucifer in Lent means that we are happy warriors. We are launching out on the spiritual battle with a spring in our step and a smile on our face. The Gospel says when we fast we should wash our face and put on a smile, and the spiritual writers speak of keeping a “joyful Lent.” We’re not going about as gloomy defeatists.

This requires a clear understanding of our own faults and the reality of temptation.

As we engage in spiritual battle during Lent, we should do so with the joyful knowledge that, no matter what, Christ’s forgiveness upholds us and that, in him, as St. Paul says, “we are more than conquerors.” When we face temptation, we should overcome it not just with a serious resolve and a whopping amount of self-control, but also with the wisdom and insight it takes to see the temptation for what it is.

Then we can sidestep the attack and parry with a counterthrust in the robust spirit of a jaunty swordsman or a laughing cavalier.

We fight joyfully because the devil is already defeated. On Easter Day he was trampled down forever. Furthermore, he was defeated in a kind of divine practical joke. It was a plot reversal that would make any filmmaker proud. Jesus is down, and the devil seems to have killed God’s Son. Then, in a totally unexpected twist, Jesus rises again, and Satan is defeated by his own wicked plan.

This is the ammunition to fire at Satan. Like a teasing teenager, we can point at Lucifer and say, “Loser! You were hoist with your own petard!”

We fight with confidence because Christ has won the victory. St. Paul again: “[N]either death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor present things, nor future things, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Finally, laughing at Lucifer in Lent reminds us to laugh at ourselves, too. When we see his mock dignity, his pomposity, his wounded pride, his vaunted self-importance, his know-it-all attitude and his sublime arrogance, we ought to see our own souls reflected there — for, if we can laugh at his foolish pride, then we ought to be able to laugh at our own, as well.

I am often reminded of a dear old nun who told me that her confessor had fallen asleep while she was making her confession. She smiled ruefully and said, “Oh dear, it seems that not even my sins are very interesting!” Then she laughed, and at that moment, her real humility was displayed.

G.K. Chesterton said that angels can fly because they take themselves lightly. This Lent, if we learn to laugh at Lucifer and laugh at ourselves, we might find that, before long, we too are taking ourselves lightly. Then who knows? Come Easter Day, we might just fly away.

Father Dwight Longenecker

Provided with permission of the National Catholic Register

Father Longnecker also has written a book in this tradition entitled, The Gorgoyle Code

Introduction to Spiritual Warfare Part III – What is the devil up to?

Q: Dear Father John, I have been working on my prayer life consistently for a few years. During this time I have been on retreats and other similar activities. I have noticed a strange pattern: the conservative groups I have had contact with talk a lot about spiritual warfare, but the less traditionalist groups don’t. Until now, I haven’t paid much attention to the discrepancy. But lately I was wondering if maybe I should look into it – maybe understanding it better will help me grow spiritually?

A: We have looked briefly at the reality of spiritual warfare, not as a distant and dramatic mystical phenomenon, but as the basic dynamism of our everyday life (Part I). And we have identified, again briefly, the three enemies against which we fight these spiritual battles: the world (understood as the sinful patterns of behavior that society in a fallen world tends to normalize), the flesh (the innate tendencies of our fallen nature that draw us towards self-centered decisions and habits), and the devil.

The devil was the first enemy that Jesus mentioned in his parable of the sower. There is something to that. We mustn’t forget that the devil is real, that he and his minions (the other angels that joined his rebellion against God and became demons) are our opponents, “prowling around like a roaring lion looking for (someone) to devour,” as St Peter explained it (1 Peter 5:8).

The devil prowls around in at least three different ways.

Possession

His most dramatic modus operandi is demonic possession. This involves the devil’s inner control of the actions of the human body. It can be permanent or intermittent. The Gospels describe multiple cases of demonic possession. Even in these cases, the victims maintain their free will – the devil can never force us to sin. Usually possession occurs as the result of someone’s dabbling in occult or esoteric spiritual activities, or through a free descent towards progressively more decadent sinful activities. But sometimes a victim can have no culpability at all. The main objective of demonic possession is to terrorize the victim and cause suffering. It is a manifestation of the devil’s hatred for those whom God loves so thoroughly.

Obsession

His second-most dramatic mode of operation is demonic obsession. This involves attempting an external control of a victim’s body or senses. Obsession can at times be violent, leaving bruises and injuries (as in the case of St John Vianney, for example). More often it takes the form of an assault on a person’s powers of sight (disturbing visions), hearing (disturbing sounds), imagination (disturbing images), memory, or emotional equilibrium. The main objective of demonic obsession is to deceive the victim, wear them down spiritually, and induce sin.

Diabolical possession and obsession are real, and I am sure this very brief summary has sparked questions. To get answers, I highly recommend Fr. Gabriel Amorth’s book, An Exorcist Tells His Story. It is also available in audio format. Fr. Amorth was the long-time exorcist in the diocese of Rome. He wrote this book in accessible – not theological – language, precisely for normal Catholics.

Temptation

By far, however, the most common activity of the devil is simply temptation. The devil’s best allies are the other two enemies: our own fallen nature (the flesh), and the fallen world. Many times, those forces are sufficient to lead us into sin. They are especially sufficient when combined with our own self-centered habits, which most of us freely spend so much time perfecting during our childhood and youth.

But as we grow in our friendship with Christ, with the help of his grace, we also grow in virtue. The gifts of the Holy Spirit bolster our humble efforts to be courageous, patient, chaste, generous, wise, joyful, and self-forgetful. As we move towards or along this path of spiritual progress, or as we set out upon it, the devil will sometimes tempt us directly. He does this by intensifying (in our perception) the seductive attractions of the world, or by turbo-boosting the drives and the tug of the flesh.

Sometimes this activity is identifiable by its suddenness, violence, and persistence. But often the devil’s temptations are extremely subtle, barely discernible to our conscious mind. They usually consist in the devil’s putting an idea – a deceptive idea, a half-truth – in front of us. This deceptive, alluring idea is a hook that, if we latch onto it, will either draw us away from God’s will, or draw our attention away from something God is trying to tell us

Rather than giving specific examples of how this happens, I would like to point you to a resource that dramatizes the process with an entertaining and brilliant accuracy, C.S. Lewis’s classic, multi-generational bestseller, The Screwtape Letters. The book compiles thirty letters written from a senior devil to a junior devil about how to engage in the tricky game of tempting humans. And for those of you who do most of your “reading” with headphones on or while you’re driving, I can also recommend a compelling (and, again, entertaining) audio dramatization of that book, recently released by Focus on the Family Radio Theatre and available here (at a discount for our readers – see below!). If you have already read this book, I recommend that you re-read it every few years. Nothing I have found exposes the devil’s tempting tactics more thoroughly or more enjoyably.

Avoiding the Extremes

Whenever we talk or think (or read) about the devil, we have to be careful. It is dangerous for us to forget about him, but it is also dangerous for us to give him too much credit. It is not difficult for Jesus to keep the devil under control. The devil is a created being; God is the Creator. The devil must obey Jesus, and is actually fearful of souls who are in the state of grace. True, he prowls around like a roaring lion, looking to make us fall into his deceits and traps, so that he can devour us. But his activity is circumscribed by God’s wisdom and omnipotence.

We can avoid giving the devil too little or too much attention if we reflect on this number from the Catechism (#395), which sums things up nicely:

The power of Satan is, nonetheless, not infinite. He is only a creature, powerful from the fact that he is pure spirit, but still a creature. He cannot prevent the building up of God’s reign. Although Satan may act in the world out of hatred for God and his kingdom in Christ Jesus, and although his action may cause grave injuries – of a spiritual nature and, indirectly, even of a physical nature- to each man and to society, the action is permitted by divine providence which with strength and gentleness guides human and cosmic history. It is a great mystery that providence should permit diabolical activity, but “we know that in everything God works for good with those who love him.

We still have one more spiritual warfare related topic to cover: how to fight against our enemies. That, God willing, will be our next post.

Yours in Christ, Father John Bartunek, LC

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