https://nitter.net/smashbaals/status/1666562294719950849#m
Damn near every tweet this bozo makes could be a dunk tank post, but what I like about this is that it’s a reminder that tens of millions of Americans believe there are actually these little demons who go around doing everything from flying spaceships to tempting Rachel in Jacksonville to go ahead and eat another Oreo.
As someone who grew up in the evangelical community in the US, the belief that “aliens are demons actually” was shockingly common.
like 20 years ago i used to live in a house with 3 roommates, and one of my roommates used to buy weed off this guy 'Jerry'. he met jerry in a used bookstore in a woo woo part of town. jerry was like mid 50s and would hangout for a while telling my roommate about how aliens are real, but also they are angels, actually. he even loaned him a huge (several hundred page, hard cover) reference book that had "information" about every angel's name "house/order/charge/purpose" etc.
jerry was a very intense individual. like one of those guys who makes and maintains eye contact too much, like a car salesman or a cult leader. i would just stay in my room when jerry came over.
i feel like this guy and jerry should be forced to hang out and be observed.
I actually have something like this, an encyclopedia of spirits. It's very interesting stuff, like the name implies it's just got the names of spirits/gods/holy figures from most of the major/minor faiths and religions through written history.
Is it A Dictionary of Angels: Including the Fallen Angels by Gustav Davidson, by any chance?
No, it's a non-denominational work; like 2,000 pages of demons, fae creatures, spirits, transcendant individuals, saints, angels, gods and goddesses, all sorts of stuff. I have piles of boxes of books at home, I will try and dig it out and share the title/author after work.
E) It was Encyclopedia of Spirits: The Ultimate Guide to the Magic of Fairies, Genies, Demons, Ghosts, Gods & Goddesses by Coast to Coast AM frequent guest Judika Illes
Ah, cool. Davidson's work was mostly Qabalah, and it went along pretty well as a quick reference alongside those Llewellyn Press Enochian ceremonial magick books that Denning and Phillips were putting out back in the 80s and 90s.
is this the same Jerry from Ze Frank's series True Facts?
Someone should give Jerry LSD and make him watch all of Evangelion
When I was much, much younger, I went through a bit of a woo shit phase. This woo shit phase included picking up a book on reiki healing, in which the author asserts that the Hindu gods were in fact aliens and made contact with early humans, in addition to imparting their innate psychic abilities to said hominids. Shortly after thumbing through this book, I discussed it with someone in a Wicca/Neopaganism chat room (on Yahoo Chat, no less) who was extremely offended that I used the word "aliens."
Edit: The same person tried to perform a long-distance reiki healing on me via the internet (literally by holding our hands up against our monitors to establish a "connection"). To be fair, I had strep, was a broke college student, and I live in Burgerland, so it was worth a shot.
i grew up in a high populated part of the country with abysmal mental health services and no social safety net. i also had a woo phase for a while in early adulthood... there's something alluring and almost prestigious about so-called traditional knowledge when the institutions of modernity are wretchedly failing. at my most disbelief-suspending times, it felt like i couldn't go a week without running into someone who was peddling some wildly off the rails conspiratorial cosmology. i had long hair and was polite/chill. I liked hanging out in low traffic bookstores and reading weird shit for free, which I guess is something I have in common with people on the fringe. so i guess i seemed approachable to someone with orders from the mothership. better me than someone who is going to prey on them, i guess?
i've been around woo and tolerant towards it for so long, but in the last decade or so as i settled into leftism, it's started to bother me. the grifting of desperate people generally, but also way focusing on individualized treatment serves to distract people from collective action to restore, improve, reform institutions to serve us. not to mention, some of the woo people i knew 10-20 years ago turned into massive reactionaries and anti-vax Q brains. it's upsetting if i think about it too much, so i tend to just make jokes about the brain worms.