Sunt Mala Quae Libas, Ipse Venena Bibas
Entry #2: Protection
By now, regular readers will be familiar with my usual caveats, but just to be clear: I am not doing science. This is not meant to serve as any kind of ironclad “proof.” I don’t expect this to topple the edifice of modern medicine, nor do I have any magic-bullet policies for an alternative system.
This is all just speculation—a bricolage of narrative elements that could suggest something missing from a set of accepted facts.
I recognize that this is the rallying cry of every other crank, weirdo, and conspiracy theorist on the Internet who is “just asking questions.” We should not let a good story get in the way of established facts. The danger of these speculative adventures is always in getting swept along by a particular narrative—that’s the fun part, feeling the momentum building, picking up speed—and floating into a set of completely evidence-free conclusions. Enjoy the rush, but keep an eye on the map. Don’t miss your pull-out. Getting back to consensus reality is a hard portage upstream, if you go too far.
That said—there’s also danger in letting the facts get in the way of a true story. Sometimes these things first appear as an impressionistic gestalt, rather than a solid chain of evidence. Like one of those optical illusions where the young woman turns into an old crone: you have to let your focus shift before you can see something hidden in the same picture.
Tell me what you see here.
I.
So far, I’ve been lucky enough to not have any close friends or family members with severe psychiatric problems. We’re a pretty boring bunch, psychologically speaking (except for occasional visits from the Black Dog). I don’t have any real standing to make normative claims about what anybody “should” do with clinical disorders.
Then again, I’ve got kids. It’s not hard for me to imagine them getting stuck with something in the future—depression, or addiction, or some other prolonged disorientation.
Here’s the course I would choose for them in those circumstances: modern medicine is really good at treating symptoms. Handle the urgent stuff first, with whatever tools are available. I can’t imagine any form of medicine, traditional or otherwise, that would try to heal the wound without stopping the bleeding first. Accept any help needed to make sure there’s still a life to save.
But—but—modern medicine is really bad at healing. Germ theory has left us obsessed with questions of corruption and purity: the human body as an empty vessel, filled with fluids that are either clean or contaminated. Supposedly, as long as we physically keep the good stuff in and the bad stuff out, optimize our inputs, it’s possible for us to be perfectly healthy1.
This leads to the brute force of a chemotherapy mindset: we’ll pump you full of chemicals, and as long as we kill the thing that’s hurting you—the germs, the hallucinations, the bad feelings—without killing you first, it’s a job well done.
All of this obscures the reality that the body is more than just its physical components. Wellness is not just the absence of disease. Sickness is not just caused by things that can be seen with microscopes, measured with blood tests, and treated with pills.
II.
I shouldn’t say that I have zero experience with psychiatric problems: traumatic grief is, technically, a psychological disorder. After my dad’s sudden death in 2022, I briefly dipped into the conventional treatment of grief counseling. Didn’t get much benefit from it.
The suggestion was that I should be processing a feeling—like the emotional equivalent of passing a kidney stone—rather than constructively engaging with a new reality. The goal was to move on: the traumatic event was in the past, and healing would happen (or at least my symptoms would lessen) once I put enough distance between myself and that moment in time.
It seemed like the approach would have been more or less the same if I was upset about a stolen bike: yes, you liked the thing. It was an important part of your life. But now the thing is gone. It is sad to have lost the thing. The best remedy is to get used to your new life, without the thing.
What did help—what I was fortunate enough to stumble into on my own, because I apparently have the right kind of personality disorder for it—was finding ways to relate to my dad in what could be generally referred to as “the afterlife.”
This isn’t the cartoon version of the afterlife. It’s not a distinct place “up there,” where my dad was given a set of wings and a harp to strum after he died. (Which is good, because he would hate that.) At minimum, it’s all the ways in which his spirit, broadly defined, is still present in my life: in my memories, in dreams, in my behavior, in the things I can still do to feel like he’s around. I still talk to him all the time, even if I don’t get a response. (And, sometimes, I do.) The qualitative effect of that awareness—my dad’s afterlife in the present, not his death in the past—matters more than all the materialist nit-picking about how these “beliefs” are artificial coping mechanisms, if not outright insanity.
And, crucially, it’s not some psychological Rube Goldberg contraption for auto-hypnosis, or a crutch that I’m using until I get better. It’s just a part of my life now. That’s why it works for me.
That version of the afterlife is a topic for a whole different post. The key point is this: none of what ended up helping me would be encouraged by modern medicine. Politely tolerated, maybe, “If that’s what works for you.” But it’s not anything that would be prescribed. On paper, it’s purely delusional, a pathological fantasy: believing in things that aren’t real, in a person who no longer physically exists.
Antidepressants? Sure! Take a jarful. Tell your friends. Choosing to believe in the spirit world, though—that’s dangerous stuff.
III.
When my five-year-old asks what’s wrong with the muttering ragman on the street corner—without getting into the minutiae of chemical imbalances and addiction, or the crypto-Calvinist moral implications of “falling through the cracks”—“bad spirits” is enough for him to understand the broad strokes of the circumstances. I think it also inspires more compassion: “That could happen to anyone?” Yep. Anybody could get possessed like that, if they live in an unwell society like ours, without the tools to stay coherent.
And really, what does “bad spirits” fail to address, if the combined forces of addiction, despair, anger, and isolation is a truly better explanation? Spirits aren’t “real”—but those things are, somehow? Can we point to where they are, in the world or in the body, more accurately than a coalescence of malign energy? What if it’s a distinction without a difference?
Or, more to the point: what if we’re only identifying the physical symptoms, and not the underlying cause?
IV.
This absolutely cannot be overstated: for people who recognize the existence of spiritual bodies, our cultural spaces look like mud wrestling in a dumpster full of medical waste. Secular Westerners don’t practice even the most rudimentary spiritual hygiene, and yet we walk through the world like we’re bulletproof.
I think this might also be described in the podcast episode linked below, but it’s worth highlighting. A culture that recognizes some form of hungry wasteland spirits would see an event like Burning Man as a mass human sacrifice: thousands of people crowding out into an otherwise-unoccupied desert, spiritually and physically open in all sorts of ways, completely unguarded against anything (or anyone) who wants to take advantage of them. You think a skinjob like Elon Musk goes to these places to vibe with the interbeingness of our shared humanity? Not a chance. He’s going there to feed—and so are all the other ethereal ticks and leeches, drawn out of the howling darkness by laughter and light.
If that seems too unbelievable, consider: there’s absolutely no benefit (apart from grumpy, unimaginative pedantry) in splitting hairs over all the ways in which that essential phenomenon is not “real.” At an absolute minimum, it’s an apt metaphor—and that means it’s pointing to something significant about how reality works.
V.
There is a researcher name Jerry Marzinsky whose work describes a connection between acute psychiatric disorders and the kind of non-corporeal entities usually referred to as “demons.” Marzinksy is a prolific interviewee on many different podcasts; this clip is a concise introduction to him and his research.
Caveats and disclaimers:
It is entirely possible that Marzinsky is a bit of a crank, and that some aspects of his work are motivated by personal and professional grievance.
Marzinsky seems to have adopted a Christian symbolic interface for dealing with this phenomenon, and has an unfortunate habit of talking as if his research is ironclad proof of Christian eschatology.
Partly as a consequence of the previous point, he has a tendency to reference Western thinkers and researchers (especially Emmanuel Swedenborg) as if they “discovered” this phenomenon—even though many traditional cultures treat the existence of harmful spirits as grade-school learning.
That said, Marzinsky’s character and beliefs shouldn’t distract from the essential phenomenon outlined by his research. Part of the reason this stuff doesn’t get more traction is because iconoclasts are a self-selecting group; the ones who are willing to go against the grain—to speak out about something controversial—also tend to be grouchy bastards have interpersonal challenges, precisely because they’re not social strivers and people-pleasers. (Case in point: me.)
Personal idiosyncrasies notwithstanding, the larger point is well taken: modern medical practitioners are not permitted to recognize the existence of discarnate entities. When confronted with accounts that suggest a deeper phenomenon, they habitually fit the evidence to the theory, in order to maintain their personal and professional standing.
Marzinsky suggests that the “hallucinations” experienced by people with psychosis, like hearing voices and seeing Shadow People, are too consistent in their presentation to be the random off-gassing of disturbed minds. They behave like distinct entities, with predictable identifiers and behaviors, across many different cultures. He says his treatments are successful in cases where mainstream medicine fails, because he allows his patients to treat the Others as real. What Marzinsky is describing is banishing, plain and simple—the first protective spell taught to children in phasmatopian cultures across the world: “Go away. You lie. Leave me alone, in the name of the Most High2 .”
This approach isn’t that far off from modern CBT remedies for intrusive thoughts. The only difference is that psychology starts by assuming those external influences are fundamentally unreal; as a precondition, it requires the patient to adopt the same belief. This creates a particular kind of cognitive dissonance. The patient is essentially told they’re being fanciful—that they have a broken brain, that “normal” people don’t believe in these things. Meanwhile, from the patient’s perspective, they’re experiencing something very real, which the therapist is simply unable to see, not least because the Others don’t want to be seen.
Once again: what do we gain by splitting hairs over all the parts of the experience that are unreal, or at least unverifiable? The framework of bad spirits is, at minimum, an effective metaphor, which could provide another avenue for treatment. But it’s unequivocally off the table because it would be venturing too far into the realms of “belief,” religion, and woo-woo spirituality3.
VI.
Anyone who was online in 2013 probably remembers hearing something about the unsolved mystery of Elisa Lam’s death at the Cecil Hotel.
The case has become a perennial subject of paranormal and pop-detective investigations, largely because of the obvious disconnect between the “case closed” verdict issued in the mainstream media and the undeniable weirdness of the story.
This is the rationalist explanation: Elisa Lam had a condition linked to bipolar disorder. While traveling alone across the United States, during a stay at the Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles, she stopped taking her medication. This led to a psychotic break, during which she climbed up to the hotel’s rooftop water tank, and either intentionally committed suicide or accidentally drowned. The famous CCTV footage of Lam in the hotel elevator, apparently interacting with an unseen person, was just the deranged behavior of a manic episode. Either that, or she’d gotten ahold of some exotic drugs that somehow didn’t show up in the toxicology report from the autopsy. Case closed.
Setting aside the pop-detective theory4—that Lam was murdered and her body intentionally hidden—there’s a reason why this explanation was never fully accepted by the public, and why speculation continues to this day: the Cecil Hotel is obviously extremely haunted.
Even for people who might otherwise consider themselves skeptics, it strains credulity to think that the place itself had absolutely no influence on the tragedy. The Cecil Hotel is a real-life manifestation of the Overlook from The Shining, minus the snow: a formerly glitzy destination for the rich and famous, built in the champagne days of Roaring Twenties Los Angeles, slowly descending into depravity and ruin. By the time Elisa Lam checked in for her stay in 2013, the Cecil had notched up a decades-long history of accidental deaths, suicides, and murders within its walls.
From a phasmatopian perspective, all hotels are liminal spaces with an unstable psychic valance. They’re inherently in-between places that encourage people to behave in unusual ways—communal shelters for the (at best) temporarily homeless, outside of ordinary reality, untethered from the constraints of their typical social settings. Even the best hotels retain a miasma of isolation, lowered inhibitions, and secrecy; because materialist culture disregards even the subconscious psychological effects of these liminal spaces (“It’s just a room!”) the residue accumulates in layers, guest after guest, year upon year.
A place like the Cecil Hotel takes that baseline phenomenon and turns it into a palpable force. Dozens of people died in that building. Each death adds to the psychic weight of the place. As its infamy grows, the physical and social upkeep of the place becomes harder to justify. Even the most stolid skeptic will get chills from being in a room where a sudden death has happened: “They were found right there, wide-eyed and cold.” Then there’s a tipping point, when so many tragedies happen in one location that only the desperate and depraved will choose to stay there. It becomes a hunting ground for predators. The aura of violence and despair creates a feedback loop that grows with each fresh victim.
The place is cursed.
And into this dark vortex walks Elisa Lam, with only the thin shield of prescription medications around her fragile psyche, believing a room with a locked door would be enough to keep her safe.
From a medical perspective, the materialist explanation falls into tautology: she died because she was mentally unstable and acting impulsively. How do we know? Because if she wasn’t mentally unstable and acting impulsively, she wouldn’t have died.
This is begging the question. Why this behavior, in this specific place? Why not at any of the previous stops on her cross-country trip? If the Cecil Hotel was a brand-new building, without any of its tragic echoes, would Lam have followed the same fatal trajectory? What exactly are the atmospheric cues that drive the behavior of psychologically overstimulated (or psychically sensitive) people? What beckoned her all the way up the hotel fire escape, all the way up the ladder, and glimmered off the water in the darkness of that tank?
She saw something or heard something that wasn’t really there, because she was crazy. How do we know she was crazy? Because she was seeing and hearing things that weren’t really there. How do we know they weren’t really there? Because we’re not crazy.
Not to belabor the point, but one last time: what do we gain by cleaving off the elements of these experiences that are unverifiable, rather than treating them as real enough? What risks come from telling people these things aren’t really real—just because we can’t see them—when sometimes they’re real enough to be fatal?
Are there other cognitive tools available, as a failsafe, in case the prescription runs out or the medicine stops working, or the voices start insisting it’s poison?
Maybe Elisa Lam was too far gone. Maybe she would have ended up dead one way or another, even if she had permission to treat whatever Others she was seeing or hearing as real. Even if she had the confidence to call them out as the liars they are—to tell them to fuck off in the name of the Almighty—maybe it wouldn’t have been enough to save her life.
But, then again, maybe that would have made all the difference.
We’ll never know, because modern science has constructed a militarized border between medicine and metaphysics, belief and reality. The body is just an empty vessel; the brain is just a filter; if we can get the fluid levels right, tweak the chemistry a bit, everyone will be fine. Keep taking your medicine. That’s what keeps the bad thoughts away.
VII.
Does this mean we should all be agoraphobics and metaphysical hypochondriacs, because the demons are waiting to pounce on us every minute of the day? Definitely not. The whole point is to relieve your anxiety, not reinforce it. It is a colossal mistake to take the neurotic assumptions of Western (heavily Christianized, by the way) medicine—the obsession with purity and corruption—and apply it to your spiritual life.
In both realms, you should be able to trust that your natural defenses are strong enough to keep you healthy and alive.
Unless you’ve been diagnosed with an exceptional condition by a specialist (not just from reading WebMD, or its occult equivalent) or you’ve been in some kind of radiation zone, you shouldn’t need to constantly worry about catching something dangerous. Our society is so focused on taking extreme measures to eliminate contamination (sometimes for good reason, but not always) that we’ve stopped valuing wellness. The boring stuff is still and always the most effective form of prevention: fresh air, sunlight, exercise, nourishing food, regular social contact with other healthy people. If you do those things, your immune system should be strong enough to take a punch once in a while, both biologically and spiritually.
It’s a fact that our society has made those building blocks of wellness less available than they once were. Still, it’s much better for your health to fight for access to those resources when necessary, for yourself and others, than it is to shut yourself away and worry, worry, worry about getting infected. That’s what makes you really sick. That’s when you might start to hear the whispers.
On the flip side—our all-or-nothing obsession with purity is a double-edged sword. It leaves us fixated on certain kinds of contamination, which might be less catastrophic than we imagine, while being completely oblivious to other very real hazards. To take just one example: I would submit that the side-effects of being exposed to graphic depictions of dozens of murders per month—in movies and TV as well as the news—don’t just rinse out of a person’s psyche, even for adults. There are a whooole lot of things that get a “Safe” label when they probably shouldn’t, just because they’re the right kind of profitable.
Trust your intuition. Trust your gut. Additionally, find a few people you can trust for mutual support, who will also keep you honest about a healthy level of vigilance.
VIII.
Modern people, religious and secular alike, have an unfortunate tendency to think of prayer as some kind of cosmic Pledge of Allegiance: a signifier of belief, either performed for God’s approval or dismissed as cowardly supplication.
The truth is that some prayers are like poetry, medicine unto themselves. And some prayers are spells.
When it comes to prayers and banishing—it doesn’t matter if the deity you’re invoking is real or not, as long as you can trick the devils into believing it.
Feel free to take that as a metaphor, or something more; either way, it’s true.
IX.
I’m sure I must have written about this somewhere else, but at the risk of repeating myself:
I’ve had a handful of really memorable nighttime visitations, like the one described in my ayahuasca essay. They’re not quite full-on night terrors; still, they’re unpleasant, and feel more substantial than regular bad dreams.
Fortunately, I’ve memorized and recited Saint Benedict’s Exorcism (in Latin) so many times that I can automatically invoke it during these episodes, even when I’m half-asleep. The dream-beasties tend to leave me alone after that.
Is this magic? Do I need to be Catholic to use it?? Is it proof of the power of the Christian God and His Divine Protection???
Don’t know. Don’t care. It works.
This particular prayer works for me because the Latin version has a really muscular cadence when it’s properly recited. Don’t sing-song it like a Gregorian chant or a kid’s bedtime prayer. Put a 4/4 marching beat behind it and really drop the hammer. See how it feels. I get chills every time I say it (when I’m awake) and that tells me it’s got some real kick.
Additional resources:
On Skepticism and the Paranormal, Weird Studies
Guardians and Protectors, The Emerald Podcast
What Possessed Me?, Occult Experiments in the Home
There’s a nutritional component to this as well. People in the Western world are finally starting to wake up to the idea that everything you eat changes how your body functions. For a long time, we treated the human body like a diesel engine; the only question we had to ask about our food-as-fuel was, “How well does it burn?” Compared to the traditional healing modalities that address subtle energy flows within the body—which were much closer the mark when it comes to gut flora, and the connections between microbiota and disease—our “modern” nutrition science looks like stereotypical caveman stupidity: if you can bash it with a club and choke it down without getting immediately sick, it’s food.
If it seems like this contradicts my previous entry—just because the Abrahamic mythos miscast one particular entity as the Big Bad, and shifted its whole defensive focus to that single antagonist, doesn’t mean that there are no demons, or that the underlying formula of a banishing spell won’t work. There are, and it will.
See also: the manufactured ethical dilemma of modern psychedelic therapists, who are inevitably forced to provide a “rational” explanation for the entities encountered by patients during their sessions. This obviously reflects a hard limit on materialist science’s capacity to separate chemical catalysts from the symbolic interfaces of traditional healing. Of course the entities are (some kind of) real; of course patients aren’t just taking a drug, but being initiated into a wider consciousness; of course that requires an established ritual framework and a robust symbolic interface, administered by a specialist who recognizes the reality of the experience. For the traditional custodians of these substances, this is a non-issue, and has been for millennia. Only in trying to extract active compounds from their proper spiritual context—modernizing the procedure, getting rid of all that pesky superstition—do we end up with this paternalistic hand-wringing about “encouraging delusions.”
Even this supposedly rational (albeit horrific) explanation feels like grasping at straws. If Lam was murdered, she wasn’t taken up to the water tank alive. The access hatch was inaccessible without first setting up a ladder; even if one was already in place, it would take an absolute lunatic with superhuman strength to drag a struggling person up that high. If she was killed or rendered unconscious somewhere else, where was the primary crime scene? And why risk that kind of convoluted effort, in a very exposed place, just to dispose of a body? Surely there must have been safer hiding places somewhere in the building, or even on the roof itself. The only logical answer points to something carefully premeditated—practically a ritual sacrifice—committed by a psychopathic monster who was never caught, and is presumably still at large at the Cecil Hotel. And if that’s the case, then the larger metaphysical question still remains: what possessed them to do it, in that place, in that way?