My dear brothers, never forget, when you hear the progress of enlightenment vaunted, that the devil’s best trick is to persuade you that he doesn’t exist!
—CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
IF YOU ARE interested in angels—and particularly, if you are interested in really believing in angels in this age when it is so hard to do so—then you have to be interested in demons. You don’t have to like them, but there is not a writer who has spoken seriously about angels without speaking seriously about demons as well. The list of important figures who took demons seriously goes back to Jesus, who spoke to them all the time, through Saint Paul, to Saint Augustine, to Thomas Aquinas, to Dante, Shakespeare . . . and so on.
Interest in demons stretches the other way as well, of course, as far back into history as we are able to see. Christianity sees demons as fallen angels, and if we look at primordial cultures around the world we see this idea prefigured constantly. The Fall is a universal theme, appearing in mythologies everywhere—a fact that disturbed some Christians when anthropologists discovered it in the nineteenth century, but which writers like C. S. Lewis took easily in stride. For to be a Christian does not demand denying or turning one’s eyes from the mythological prefigurings of the Christian story found all over the world. As Lewis—as believing a Christian as one could ask for—reasoned: Why should there not be such prefigurings? If the story of Jesus is the defining story of humankind, why would one not see anticipations and echoes of it everywhere in human history?
The same goes for the story of Satan, the adversary who tempted Eve into a domain of knowledge that shattered the privileged position that she and Adam, the primordial humans, enjoyed before his meddling. This story appears everywhere as well, from the stories of Native Americans to the ancient Greeks. The story is universal because the event it describes is universal: the human entrance into a knowledge of the moral dimension of the cosmos.
It continues to show up today as well, not in the form of myths, but in real life.
I first came across Joe Fisher’s name while doing the research for a book of mine called The Modern Book of the Dead. Fisher had written some well-regarded books on spiritual topics. But far and away his most interesting book to me was one called Hungry Ghosts (later republished under the title The Siren Call of Hungry Ghosts). In this book, Fisher relates how, during the course of writing a book with Dr. Joel Whitton, a psychologist, he’d heard of a “channeling circle” that took place weekly in an apartment not too far from him in Toronto. Fisher joined the group and began to take regular part in it. During the sessions a woman he calls Aviva Neumann (not her real name) fell into a trance and spoke on behalf of a half dozen spiritual beings. These beings, decidedly bossy in nature, soon had Fisher completely in their thrall, and he began to fall prey to the delusion that he was on the verge of what he saw as the single greatest discovery in history: proof (there’s that word again) that the soul survives death. Fisher was by all accounts a nice guy—pleasant, well-intentioned, and hardworking, with a wide set of interests and a serious dedication to the craft of journalism. But he was also possessed by certain weaknesses of character—gaps in his personality that the entities who appear to have been working through Aviva quickly identified and took advantage of. Reading his story, it is remarkable to see how closely the beings he came into contact with adhere to the list of behaviors attributed to demons by Jesus, Saint Paul, and such early Christian writers as Gregory of Nyssa and Basil of Caesarea.
One of Fisher’s shortcomings was an inability to establish a really solid romantic relationship. Though he had had his share of girlfriends, Fisher had never really been able to connect and remain with a partner for any length of time. Fisher’s parents were British, and he admired the bond his parents (his father was a minister) had formed. But he had never succeeded in forming such a bond himself, and he was, at the time he joined the channeling circle, doubtful that he ever would.
One of the things I immediately liked about The Siren Call of Hungry Ghosts was the candor with which Fisher laid forth his story. His tone was patently sincere and honest, and it made it easy to continue to believe him as his book became ever more bizarre, outlandish, and genuinely disturbing. Fisher, during the writing of the book, actually loses his mind, and, in a very frightening way, we follow right along with him as he does.
When it came to Fisher’s difficulties in securing a lasting romantic bond, the spirits were happy to step in. They supplied Fisher with the solution to his troubles in the form of a beautiful young Greek girl named Filipa, with whom he had apparently shared a past life several centuries before on the coast of Greece.
At first, Filipa didn’t speak directly to Fisher. He was simply told of her existence by the other spirits and encouraged to meditate on her every day, trying to bring her being into his. Eventually, however, Filipa’s voice, distinctly different from all the other channeled voices, came “through” Aviva Neumann, and Fisher learned directly from Filipa further details of their intense but ill-fated romance in the Greece of several hundred years ago. Fisher found himself counting the minutes each week until it was time for them to meet again.
Page by page, Fisher loses ever further touch with reality and with the people in his life, and it is clear—to the reader at least—that this is just what the spirits want. His friends advise him to discontinue the experiment. His mother, on a phone call from England, says that she believes him when he says the beings he is talking to are real. But she says she also believes that they are demons, and she doesn’t like it one bit.
Fisher’s real-life girlfriend, meanwhile, at first tolerant of his attendance at the weekly séances, eventually grows tired of sharing Joe with his new spiritual girlfriend. After all, it is easy enough to see that he finds Filipa considerably more interesting than the mere flesh-and-blood being she is. Fisher and his girlfriend break up, and he has full freedom to pursue his relationship with Filipa.
As Fisher’s infatuation with Filipa grows, so does his sense of mission. He feels—and hears—Filipa inside him, knowing she is there from a particular buzzing sound he gets in his ears. He develops an all but messianic urge to demonstrate proof to the world that death is an illusion. At lunch with a trusted friend who has published some of his articles, he is asked directly why he continues with an experiment that is clearly having negative effects on him. Fisher answers honestly: Because the world as it is just doesn’t make sense.
Yet another remarkable aspect of the book to me was how much, at least initially, the information given by the spirits lined up with checkable facts (That demons mix truth with lies was a fact well known to Jesus and Paul as well. Demons have power. If they didn’t, the New Testament authors wouldn’t have bothered talking about them as much as they do). One spirit in particular supplied Fisher with details of the last weeks of his former life on earth when he was a British aviator during World War II. Fisher travels to England to check out some of the more obscure details this spirit gives him, and they line up. Stunningly, inexplicably, the spirits are on the mark again and again. Fisher is on the verge of generating a revolution in our understanding of the physical and spiritual worlds that will literally change the course of history. Or so he thinks.
Then, slowly but surely, things begin to slip. With a surprise equal to that which he experienced when he came across all the details the spirits got right, he now discovers that they are starting to get a lot of stuff wrong. Demoralized and infuriated, Fisher confronts the spirits. How do they explain their errors in fact that he has uncovered?
As spirits will, they dissemble. They do their best to slide around the issue, and when Fisher persists, they get angry. Fisher determines the great test of whether the spirits are real or not will come with a trip to Greece—specifically to the area where he and Filipa were supposed to have played out the drama of their doomed romantic relationship. Laboriously, Fisher locates and travels to the exact area the spirits have described, only to discover yet another long and devastating series of discrepancies. The spirits, it seems, are full of baloney.
And yet, even after the reader has long lost patience with Fisher, a question lingers about these patently untrustworthy beings that are slowly but surely driving him mad: Who are they? For halfway through the book, one can’t help but get the feeling that Fisher really is talking to someone, or something, other than the frail and not overwhelmingly interesting woman that all these voices are emanating from. The words that Fisher’s mother had spoken on the phone return again and again to the reader’s mind: “You’re talking to demons. And I don’t like the sound of it one bit.”
At long last, Fisher disengages from the spirits and stops going to the weekly meetings. He publishes the first edition of Hungry Ghosts, issuing dire warnings to anyone else who might, like he was, be tempted into such explorations. His descriptions of the spirits who have deceived him so are far beyond unflattering. They are damning.
Hungry Ghosts came out originally in 1990 and several years later was republished, this time in the edition and under the title that I read: The Siren Call of Hungry Ghosts. This edition contains an epilogue explaining what Fisher has been up to since the original edition came out. Most fascinatingly, he describes suffering an infection of the navel, an extremely rare and extremely painful condition usually suffered only by newly born children.
The navel, as Fisher notes in his description of his ordeal, is a very symbolic part of the body. It is our center and represents our connection to the spiritual world that brought us forth. In seeking to infect him there, it is almost as if the spirits were doing more than simply antagonizing him. They were trying to remove his very center, to knock him from his bearings and send him once and for all into the miasmal outer darkness where they dwell. (In this they are doing exactly the opposite of what guardian angels are said to do: keep one centered on the beam of one’s essential self, just as the beings behind Lindbergh on his journey across the Atlantic were set on helping him stay on course.)
The reissue of the book came out on May 8, 2001. Fisher killed himself, jumping from a cliff near his isolated cabin outside Toronto, the next day, May 9.
Why tell this sad and troubling story in a book that is supposed to be about angels? The answer is simple. Stories like Fisher’s can be very helpful. Why? Because they get under our skin. They line up with astonishing precision with what scripture tells us of demons, but we do not need to squint across centuries to see them. These occurrences happen right here, right now, and in that closeness to us there is a great benefit: they can convince people otherwise uninterested in the possibility that demons, fallen angels, and suchlike things might actually be real. I can’t claim to understand exactly whom or what Fisher was talking to, but his book was strong enough to convince me he was talking to something. The possibility that these beings were not only real but malevolent is also valuable, for if we are able to acknowledge that evil genuinely exists, that it is a real force in the world, then it becomes a lot easier to acknowledge that good exists as well. In other words: if evil is real, then so (most likely) is good.
And if good and evil are real and not empty abstractions in a world without meaning (the world materialism asserts we live in) then paradoxically enough, that is good news. For if there is one thing that, if true, is worse than the fact that evil exists in our world, it is the possibility that evil doesn’t exist. The polarities of Good and Evil, if they are living spiritual realities and not just words, are all the evidence we need to realize that we live in a world that started somewhere, that is going somewhere, that is saturated at every point with meaning, and in which we play an active, and perhaps crucial, part. We are given back our true dignity as spiritual beings living momentarily in a physical world that is itself but a small part of a much, much larger spiritual world.
If you go out walking, and you find yourself in a murky swamp that leaves your shoes soaked through when you get home, the point to focus on is not the mud, but the water. In a world where there are murky swamps, there must also be lakes, and rivers, and seas. If there is a true and real world of Evil with a capital E, then there is a true and real world of Good with a capital G.
Where there are demons, there are angels. Where there is a hell, there is a heaven. Where there are inexplicable events and actions, there is a larger, more-than-physical world where these events and actions have come from, and within which they can, perhaps, be found to have meaning. And—though of course this last bit asks for faith, not philosophy—there is a God who sees and cares about it all.
On December 14, 2012, I drove up to Great Barrington, Massachusetts, to visit a friend of mine named Chris Bamford. Along with my friend Gene Gollogly, Chris is the publisher of SteinerBooks. Rudolf Steiner was an Austrian philosopher of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the author of many books, and the creator of biodynamic farming and the Waldorf school system. Steiner was a genius, but a controversial and often difficult one to understand. He was also a Christian and a student of the invisible world, but his works are extremely challenging, and it has been chiefly through Chris’s writings on Steiner that I have come to understand his vision of life at least a little. Chris is one of the very few people I know who I suspect really does walk around without that glass helmet on.
I visit Chris at least once a year, because there is never a time when I do that I don’t learn something that I remember later—that sticks with me. On this visit, it was a fairly simple statement on Chris’s part that brought me up short.
“The thing I’ve been thinking about recently,” said Chris, “is that it’s all . . . right here.”
He gestured around to the sidewalk we were on, with its health-food shops and gift stores. “The angelic hierarchies are all right here, right now. We are in the middle of them, but we don’t see them.”
As it happened, the day of that visit to Chris was also the day of the Sandy Hook school shooting. Driving up to Great Barrington from Nyack, New York, where I live, I passed close by Newtown, Connecticut, and was little more than half an hour away from it when I heard the first reports of the event on the radio. Now, several years later, when I open my computer and see yet another report of another shooting at a school or a mall or wherever, I think of a picture I saw of Adam Lanza’s room—of how the windows were taped off so that not a bit of light could get in. Lonely and cut-off as that young man was, I’m quite sure that sealed-off room of his was anything but empty.
So the message of evil entities is essentially the same as the message of the angels: the world is bigger than we think it is, and we are more than we think we are. Our fates are larger than our earthly ones, and that is only underlined when an individual’s earthly fate is especially short and tragic. That was the message hidden in the Boren horror—the message that Tyler finally gleaned from it, thanks to the work of those two beings at his legs, who felt his pity and sadness and sought to console him.