On the Hunt of Evil

Many years ago, what in fact feels like many lifetimes ago, when I was still in prison I was assigned a job as a janitor on Death Row. It was one of the worst places on I’ve ever been for a lot of reasons, but what sticks out the most was the atmosphere of hate that filled those halls. It was oppressive. It weighed me down. I noticed that some of the guys I worked with didn’t seem to notice, while others couldn’t stand it and would lose it. It’s very common for guys who get assigned to work in Death Row to suddenly “go crazy” and get sent to Medium Custody. You might think it was because of the men housed there. Everyone has been convicted of capitol murder and there were over 400 men being housed there at the time. You could also think it had more to do with the system and the guards, who definitely abused the inmates any chance they got. But I knew otherwise. Those halls were filled with evil spirits.

Let’s back up. Years before that I had a friend named Mickey. We hung out in the day room all the time. Mickey could see spirits. It sounded a little crazy at the time, but he said he could see these black shadowy figures that would start to gather. Then they would pick one or two guys and just start swooping down around them and fly through them. These guys would almost always suddenly explode in anger and a fight would break out or something worse. Mickey was so good at predicting these outbursts that you couldn’t help but believe him. Over the months I realized that what he was seeing, I was feeling. You see Mickey was clairvoyant, he could see spirits. I am clairsentient, I can feel them. So by the time I was on Death Row I was very familiar with the feeling of those evil spirits.

At the time I was deep in my practice of Catholic Mysticism. So I thought they were demons. I knew there were different types of spirits beyond the simple categories of angels and demons, but these were so purely evil that I had no doubt they were demons.

So years pass and I move through different phases of my magickal journey. I’d been out of prison for years and was in a Facebook group with a lot of different traditions and many of the people in there worked with demons and were very open about how friendly they were and how easy they were to work with. At first I assumed the people were being tricked by the evil demons, but as time went on I began to wonder if I might be mistaken. People were reporting a lot of inner growth and transformation from working with demons, which baffled me. The spirits I’d dealt with on Death Row wouldn’t help anyone mature into a better person. All they would do is tear you down quickly.

So I began to study. Now spirit names and categories is one of the most confusing mysteries to try and research. Everyone has different opinions and magick is so subjective. Plus you have all the different cultures. People calling all different kinds of spirits daemons, and then that became demon and it was a mess.

My own belief system was evolving too. I began to see that the natural order was both creation and destruction, so God (which I will now call Divinity) was both creation and destruction. And there were spirits that naturally worked for one side or the other, but they were all natural and just doing their job. So they were all angelic for lack of a better word. Now certainly if you ran into a powerful angel of destruction while it was doing it’s job you’d think you were facing a demon, but these entities weren’t evil. They didn’t hate. So they weren’t what I was looking for.

I began to focus on the Goetia. These spirits have a long and detailed history. But without going into too much detail, I began to realize they were mostly earth spirits. They weren’t fallen angels and they definitely weren’t the evil spirits I ran into in prison. These spirits are very well connected with humans subconscious, and if you don’t know yourself well can seem very evil because of what they dredge up out of your own shadow. But that evil comes from you, not the spirit.

This is also true of the demons associated with the Qliphoth. I know this will be controversial, but the real left hand path is about facing your shadow head on and embracing it. The demons of the Qliphoth appear to be much more horrifying, but they are again cloaking themselves in your shadow, making you face the darkness within yourself. Many magicians fail, and end up worse than before, but that’s not the demons fault. Ultimately facing your shadow is a good and healthy thing. Not something real evil would embrace.

As I became more experienced and more studied I began to understand a little more about what happens after we die. Our soul has different parts that go to different places. One part can move on or be reincarnated, but another part stays. The goal of this part of our soul is to join the ancestors. The ancestors are the healthy dead, the vibrant and shinning ones. However in our modern world it’s much harder for the dead to become healthy. They linger as ghosts. Some were bad people and will lash out. These types of ghosts we all know about in some form or another. But there’s more going on here than I think most people realize.

There is a spectrum of the dead. At one end you have the ancestors. The dead who have been healed and are what you might call good. They want to help us. Eventually they move into a sort of collective, composite, being. Some powerful personalities shine out of it, we might think of these as saints, the term will be different from culture to culture. But the same pattern goes the other way. The unhealthy dead for the most part are just troubled ghosts. But as they moved further away from the healthy vibrant ancestors they become something else. Twisted by their own selfishness and angst, they are the evil dead. They form their own collective of evil that wants nothing more than to cause pain and suffering. But within that collective are some very powerful personalities. Because I don’t want to reuse terms with different meanings, I call them banes. They are a curse upon us.

There is little about this in books. I don’t know why. You can see it a little in the Book of Enoch, that the souls of the wicked people who died in the flood became “demons.” There are other stories in other cultures. The hungry dead from Buddhism comes to mind. The truth is that I didn’t discover this from a book. I was so curious about this subject that my Holy Guardian Angel showed me.

It was an interesting story. I actually wanted to work with Raziel. I did her pathworking and when I asked Raziel to show me something she sort of handed me off to my Holy Guardian Angel. I took her hand and she took me to a place without any color or life. I can’t help but call that place Gehenna. It really is the trash heap of the cosmos. It was grey. The sky was overcast and grey. The ground was a grey wasteland. There were thousands of dead people curled up within themselves. They were so self centered they couldn’t escape themselves. I got the impression they were torturing themselves. Imagine being trapped in the worst parts of you, the sick, unwell parts of you that you try to overcome or hide. Eventually they are eaten from the inside out by the sickness within them and give themselves over to the collective evil dead. It appeared to me as a great wall of twisted horrible faces. They were so full of pain that all they wanted was to hurt others. And then I saw the ones who grew strong from that great wall of suffering. Instead of being consumed by it, they grew within it.

These banes are the real cause of supernatural evil in our world. I don’t claim to know if they manipulate us, or how much of the worlds problems are a result of them. But they aren’t all powerful. You can protect yourself easily enough. I was able to hold them back by saying the rosary all those years ago on Death Row. Just saying it to myself to keep the evil at bay. Always remember they are human. They come from a place with a culture. So listen to the old ways of your people. They are full of ways to protect yourself from evil spirits. The best thing you can do though is work with your ancestors to heal the unhealthy dead in your lineage. This book has practical rituals that will help you do just that.

My hunt for evil lead me down some strange paths. I expected to find some supernatural source of all the suffering in the world. I should have known that the real source of evil was in us all along. The human heart. Even the supernatural evil I was looking for comes from us.