You have heard this one before, and you have probably heard it from someone who meant well. A scientist spends years breeding a more beautiful butterfly, and on the morning the chrysalis is finally due to open the whole research team gathers with champagne. The case splits, one wing comes free, and the other stays caught. The creature struggles. The scientist cannot bear it, takes a scalpel, and opens the casing a little further so the second wing can come out. The butterfly falls to the table exhausted, gives a few weak flaps, and then nothing. It never flies. The moral arrives on cue: the flapping against the shell is what drives blood into the wings, so the struggle was never the obstacle, it was the making, and by removing the suffering the kind man removed the strength. Suffering prepares us for glory.

It is a good story. It is also, in almost every particular, not how butterflies work, and I think the difference matters more than a nature lesson usually would.

What actually happens is quieter than the fable allows. A butterfly comes out of the case with its wings crumpled and soft, and it does not beat them; it climbs a little way up, turns head-upward, lets the wings hang, and goes still. Then it begins to pump, not with the wings but with the whole body, contracting the abdomen to push hemolymph out along the wing veins the way you might work water into a folded sail. The wings unfurl by pressure over about half an hour, and then they harden over several more, and during all of that the creature does very nearly nothing at all. Flapping at that stage would be a catastrophe. The wings are wet and pliable and take a permanent crease from anything they touch, so the one thing that would truly ruin them is exactly the exertion the story insists on. What the animal needs in that hour is gravity, stillness, damp air, and something to hold onto while it is soft.

And the one genuinely stuck in its casing is not usually undergoing a productive trial. It is stuck because the air was too dry, or a parasite got in, or something went wrong in the making, and it is not building strength in there, it is dying. If you cut it free too early you will get a crippled insect, that part is true enough, but not because you cheated it of its workout. You get a crippled insect because you interrupted a timing that could not be hurried and handled tissue that could not yet be touched. (The story cannot even keep its own furniture straight, incidentally, since butterflies make a chrysalis and it is moths that spin cocoons, and our scientist somehow has both.)

I would let all of that go as harmless folklore, except for who tends to be standing nearby when the moral gets delivered. Nobody tells the butterfly story to a person having an ordinary week. It gets told over hospital beds and across kitchen tables at eleven at night, to the woman whose marriage is coming apart and the man who has just buried his father, and in that setting it quietly does two ugly things. It tells the sufferer that the agony is a training programme and that any wish for it to stop is a wish to be made weak, which means their pain now comes with homework attached. And it hands everyone else a reason to keep their distance and call it wisdom, because if the struggle is the mechanism then reaching in would be sabotage, and standing back with your arms folded becomes the loving thing to do. That is how a great deal of religious cruelty gets itself dressed for church.

Here is the part I want you to have, because the corrected biology gives us a better picture than the fable ever did, and a truer one.

Something real is happening inside that case, and it is not muscle-building. The grub does not sprout wings; it comes apart. Most of what it was dissolves, and out of that dissolving something is written that was never there before, and the whole business is irreversible and takes precisely the time it takes. You cannot rush it, you cannot assist it, and you cannot skip the part where you are unrecognisable to yourself.

The slinky

Let me tell you how I came to know this, since it did not arrive from a nature documentary and it certainly did not arrive graciously.

One of my children went through something severe this past season. Nothing he had done, nothing he deserved, and nothing that could be traced back to a bad decision he might learn from, just life doing what life does, except that in this case the harm came through another person’s incompetence and the wreckage landed on a kid who had trusted the grown-ups in the room. And so I did what I always do. My phone became a weapon. There were calls to make and letters to write and doors to push on, and I pushed on every one of them, going above and beyond in the way that every loving parent recognises, because when you watch your child suffer the impulse to fix it is not a character flaw, it is the deepest and most decent thing in you standing up and demanding a job.

The trouble was that it was not working. Weeks in, if I am honest with you, my sense of it was that I was failing, or at least that everything I touched seemed to be getting worse rather than better, and the harder I drove the more complicated the situation became.

Then came the afternoon in the school car line. There was a plastic slinky on the floorboard of the car, and to this day nobody in my house has claimed it or explained how it got there. It had a tangle in it, as slinkys always do, a few coils crossed over where they should have lain flat. Waiting there with the engine running and nothing else to occupy me, I set about fixing it. Every correction I made bred two more crossings. The coils folded through each other, the loop I freed on one side pulled three more through on the other, and within a couple of minutes what had been a slinky with a small tangle was a solid knotted ball of plastic sitting uselessly in my palm. And I said out loud, in real frustration, with nobody in the car to hear it: everything I do just makes it worse.

The answer came back before the sentence had finished landing. There was no thunder and no theatre about it, just that particular quality of knowing which does not sound like your own interior monologue and does not arrive on your schedule, and which you recognise afterward precisely because you would never have said it to yourself in that tone. Yes, Aaron. And that is exactly what is happening with your son.

Sit with what that did and did not say. It did not tell me I loved him wrongly, or too much, or that my instinct to protect him was a sin to be repented of. What it told me was that my love had picked up the wrong instrument, and that the very hands which had served that boy well a hundred times before were, in this particular tangle, the thing tightening it. The knot did not need force. It needed slack, and time, and someone willing to stop working it.

Isaiah says it in one line, and it has been sitting in my chest ever since that afternoon: in returning and rest you shall be saved, in quietness and trust shall be your strength. Notice that Isaiah is not talking to the wounded there. He is talking to a nation in a genuine crisis that has decided its salvation lies in getting to Egypt fast enough, in horses and chariots and the competent superior power that will surely handle this, and the sting in the tail of that verse is the four words that follow it: but you would not. That rebuke does not fall on the sufferer. It falls squarely on the fixer, on the one running the strategy, which is the only place in this whole essay it can safely fall, and I have been the man on the horse often enough to feel the point of it.

The strength does not come from the flapping

Watch where the power actually comes from in that hour on the branch. Nothing arrives from outside. No one blows air into those wings, no one splints them or props them open, and the creature is not hauling itself into flightworthiness by effort. The pressure that fills the veins is generated deep in the body, in the abdomen, in the dark part of the animal that has no idea it is performing a miracle, and it moves outward and upward until the thing that was folded is open. That is worth sitting with, because it is precisely inverted from how most of us try to get well. We reach up and out. We look for the technique, the teacher, the explanation, the arrangement of circumstances that will finally let the wings open, and all the while the actual mechanism is running quietly underneath the floor of our attention, in a place we do not have conscious access to and were never meant to manage.

The hardest instruction in a season of undoing is therefore not “try harder” but “stop solving.” That part of us that manages, that keeps the accounts and runs the contingencies and treats every ache as a problem awaiting the right intervention, will experience stillness as negligence. It will tell you that you are wasting the crisis. It will offer you one more book, one more strategy, one more three in the morning replay of the conversation where you should have said the other thing, and it will present all of that frantic activity as responsibility. But you cannot think your way out of a dissolving. You can only be present while it finishes, which is an entirely different labour and a far more costly one, because effort at least lets you feel useful and stillness gives you nothing to hold but the branch.

There is a reason the tangle tightens. A slinky has no capacity to be argued with, and neither does grief, and neither does the slow work going on inside a person who is coming apart. All of them respond to force by taking the shape of the force applied, which means every intervention leaves a mark that then has to be undone by the next one, and the ball in my hand that afternoon was not a picture of my failure so much as a picture of my method. Laid flat on a table and left alone, most of those crossings fall out under their own weight. The metal remembers what it is. So does a soul.

Understand that I am not handing you stillness as a new performance to fail at. If you are thrashing tonight, you are not doing your suffering wrong. The point is not that you must become serene before the strength will come; the point is that the strength was never contingent on your composure in the first place. It rises whether you are graceful or not. And notice, please, that it rises from within you and yet you are not its author. The butterfly’s own body does the pumping, and the butterfly did not design the wing, did not choose the hour, and could not have told you what was happening. What you have been straining upward for is closer than that and lower than that, working in the dark of you, and the whole invitation of these seasons is to stop reaching for it long enough to feel it move.

Be the branch

Which brings me to the other half, and to what I think is the most practical thing in the whole essay.

If the fable is wrong about the struggle, then everything it implies about the bystander is wrong too. The question stops being whether to cut or to withhold the scalpel, because both of those are still fantasies of intervention, and it becomes something much less dramatic and much harder to sustain. Somebody in that hour needs a place to hang, still air, an unhurried stretch of time, and the certainty that the thing they are gripping will not move. None of that is treatment. All of it is presence, and presence is the one thing we are constantly tempted to trade away for advice.

Be honest about where the urge to fix actually comes from. When someone we love is coming apart in front of us, the discomfort in the room is not only theirs, and reaching for the scalpel, or the scripture, or the silver lining, or the story about the butterfly, is very often a way of managing our own distress rather than their pain. Advice ends the unbearable moment. It lets us feel competent and lets us leave. So the discipline is to notice that pull, and to let it go unanswered, and to keep sitting there with our hands empty. My hands were not empty in that car line, and that was rather the point of the lesson.

What it looks like in practice is unglamorous. It looks like showing up on the Tuesday when the casseroles have stopped and the funeral is three months back and everyone else has moved on. It looks like asking how they are and then actually waiting through the pause instead of filling it. It looks like refusing to narrate their agony back to them as a lesson, refusing to tell them what God is teaching them, refusing to hurry them toward the resolution that would make us more comfortable. Holding space is not a mystical posture and it is not a technique to be certified in; it is the ordinary, repeated decision to remain steady and unhurried near someone who cannot yet be either. Be the thing that does not move. Let them do their pumping in the dark, and let the timing be theirs.

And here is the part that costs a parent something, so I will say it plainly. Being the branch for your own child means trusting that there is something at work in him that did not come from you, that does not require your management, and that will hold when you are not in the room. My son was never going to be talked out of what happened to him, and no amount of my competence was going to shorten the hour. What he needed from his father was a place to hang on while the wings were still soft, and I very nearly spent the whole season too busy fixing to be that.

The Saturday

So I will not tell you that your suffering was sent to make you strong, because I do not believe it was, and neither does the body of anyone who has actually been through it. What I will tell you is that the dark has never been sterile ground in this tradition of ours; the seed goes into it and the third day is real, but the silence of the Saturday in between is not God’s teaching method, it is simply the shape the making takes. The glory on the other side is not manufactured by the pain. Something older and kinder than pain is doing the writing, and it works in the dark because the dark is where such work is done.

If you are in that hour now, wet-winged and crumpled and unable to show anybody anything, then hear this plainly. You do not owe the room a demonstration. You are not failing because you are still, and you are not disqualified because you are not still. Hang on, keep your head up, let it take the time it takes, and let the strength come the way it actually comes, which is from the inside out and without your management. And if it is not you but someone near you who is hanging there half-formed, then resist both temptations, the scalpel and the sermon. Do not cut, do not preach. Stay close enough that when the wings finally open there is somebody there who did not leave.

They will open. That is the thing nobody in the story remembered to say. The wings were always going to open, and the champagne was never really for the scientist.

She had broken badly with Moina Mathers, who ran the order Fortune belonged to and was the widow of the man who founded it, and in the aftermath Fortune went through a stretch of experience she could not account for. What makes the book worth reading almost a century later is who was writing it. Fortune had studied psychology under J. C. Flügel at University College London and worked as a lay psychotherapist at a clinic in Brunswick Square. She came to the question with clinical categories already in hand, and the book is largely an argument with herself about what could and could not be explained by them.

That detail matters for what follows, because the same situation has a way of recurring.

I am a licensed psychotherapist. For a period of years my family and I were the target of a sustained campaign of prayer directed against us by Christians, and the effects were serious and lasting. I did not learn the shape of it until later, when it came out that a group of pastors in my community had been meeting every week for that express purpose. The description of what they were doing in those meetings is not mine. It comes from a man who attended them. His words were that they met to pray witchcraft curses over me.

They named it themselves. Not as an accusation from outside, not as an interpretation I am imposing after the fact. One of the participants called it witchcraft, out loud, in a room, and it was happening weekly.

I want to handle this the way a clinician handles a case, because that is the only way it is useful to anyone.

Fortune’s account of what an attack presents like is specific, and it has held up better than most of what has been written on the subject since.

The person under attack reports a sense of oppression or weight that does not correspond to anything happening in their circumstances. Sleep breaks down first and it breaks down in a characteristic way, with repeating dreams and a pattern of waking in the small hours with the conviction that something is present. There is fatigue disproportionate to exertion, and a drained quality that changes with location. There is the sense of being observed. There is mental obsession, meaning the target cannot stop thinking about the source, which Fortune considered part of the mechanism rather than a side effect of it. Physical symptoms appear without a medical finding. Vitality drops. Household animals behave abnormally. There are disturbances in the environment that the person cannot account for and eventually stops mentioning to anyone.

Anyone who has worked in charismatic ministry recognizes that list, because it is the same list circulating under different vocabulary in every book on the deliverance shelf. The difference is what Fortune does next.

She spends a great deal of the book insisting that it is probably not an attack.

She is unrelenting about this. Before drawing any conclusion, exclude the ordinary. See a physician. Consider exhaustion, grief, anemia, thyroid, alcohol, drugs, and the ordinary machinery of a mind failing under load. She states plainly that a large proportion of what arrives at an occultist’s door is pathological, that a practitioner who cannot tell the difference is dangerous, and that handing a person with a genuine psychiatric illness a framework of spiritual assault is close to the worst thing that can be done to them. After 35 years of praying for people and counseling them I totally concur.

That is a more rigorous differential than most deliverance ministry practices, and it is not close. The occultist sends people to doctors. The ministry sends them to demons, and the people who get hurt worst by that are the ones who were already ill.

It is also the reason I can say what I am about to say.

I know what depression looks like from the inside of a treatment room and from the inside of a life. I have carried a caseload. I know the presentation, the course, the differential, and the things it is commonly mistaken for. What my family went through during those years was not that, and I do not say so casually, because the professional obligation runs the other direction. The clinician’s default is always the mundane explanation. I ran the mundane explanations first, the way Fortune says to, and they did not account for it.

The distinction Fortune draws that matters most here is between deliberate and non-deliberate attack.

The non-deliberate kind is the common one, and by her account it is everywhere. It comes from ordinary people who have never performed a ritual and would be offended to hear their activity described as magic. It is generated by sustained, emotionally charged fixation on another person. Someone who broods on you, who cannot put you down, who thinks about you daily with heat attached and wants something to happen to you. Fortune’s position is that this accumulates and travels and lands, and that it requires no belief in magic on the sender’s part. Sincerity is the power source. Theology is irrelevant to the mechanics.

That describes a very large amount of what happens in American prayer meetings.

The deliberate kind is rarer. It requires intent, repetition, structure, and a group holding a single target over time. Fortune assumed that kind of thing was mostly confined to trained occultists and that ordinary people would never encounter it.

She did not anticipate a standing weekly appointment on a pastor’s calendar.

Whatever else is true, a group of clergy convening on a schedule to direct malediction at a named individual is not the accidental variety. It has every structural feature of the deliberate one. Fixed intent, fixed target, ritual repetition, and group amplification. The only element missing is the robe, and the robe was never the operative part.

None of this is fringe behavior at the edge of American Christianity. It has a public literature and a retail market.

Around 2009 it was possible to buy merchandise in the United States reading Pray for Obama, Psalm 109:8, which is the verse asking that a man’s days be few and another take his office. The next verse asks that his children be fatherless and his wife a widow. A Southern Baptist pastor stated on the radio in the same period that he was praying imprecatory prayers for the president’s death, and remained in ministry afterward. Through the nineties and two thousands, the strategic-level spiritual warfare movement built an entire vocabulary of targets, strongholds, and spiritual mapping, in which a person or a business or a neighborhood is identified and sustained prayer is directed at it. The word chosen for this by its own practitioners was warfare.

The imprecatory psalms are real and they are savage, and there is a long serious literature on what to do with them. What is not in dispute is what the New Testament says about the practice.

Bless them that curse you. Bless and curse not. James, who is blunt about it, writes that out of the same mouth proceed blessing and cursing, and that these things ought not so to be. And in Luke, when the disciples propose calling fire down on a Samaritan village that refused them, with scriptural precedent in hand and permission requested, they are rebuked, and told they do not know what manner of spirit they are of.

There is no serious case that a weekly curse meeting is Christian practice. There is only the fact that it happens, that the people doing it consider themselves orthodox, and that no structure within their world exists to stop them.

Fortune had a position on cursing and it was not a soft one.

She wrote that the edge of the abyss is well fenced, and that it is not possible to fire a gun and avoid the recoil. She wrote that a person should think many times before undertaking a work of malediction, and she meant that the primary danger runs backward, up the line, to the sender. Her concern in those passages is not the target. It is what the act does to the one performing it.

The occultist considered cursing so hazardous to the person doing it that she wrote warnings against it into a book intended for practitioners.

The pastors put it on the weekly calendar. Now don’t get me wrong I am not angry with those pastors in fact I completely understand what they were doing and why they were doing it. And it is not like I was defenseless against it, but that is me not everyone has the same understanding of how to deal with it.

The last piece of Fortune’s doctrine is the one with the most practical value, and it cuts directly against the way the church that produced those meetings trains its people.

She held that nothing can attach to you that does not find a corresponding hook. An incoming force needs something in you to grip, a matching point, and while guilt and anger and unresolved material will all serve, the primary opening is fear. Fear installs the handle. A person who has been taught that the world is dense with malevolent forces looking for entry has already done most of the work for anything that wants in.

Set that against the standard American evangelical curriculum on this subject, which teaches that ordinary objects carry spiritual danger, that a board game opens a portal, that a song or a book or an ancestor’s decision grants legal ground in a person’s life, and that vigilance must be permanent. That curriculum is not protection. By Fortune’s analysis it is the systematic manufacture of the exact interior condition that makes a person vulnerable, and the remedy on offer is further exposure to the thing that produced it.

It also explains something about the men in that weekly meeting. People who genuinely believe they are surrounded by witchcraft will eventually start doing witchcraft, because the category has to go somewhere and they have already accepted that curses work. The only question left is who deserves one.

By this accounting there is more malefic witchcraft being practiced in churches and by christian leaders than you will ever find at the local metaphysical fair.

The English word witch comes from Old English, wicce for a woman and wicca for a man, with a verb, wiccian, meaning to practice whatever it was they practiced. That is about as far as anyone can honestly take it.

I have heard other definitions, and both of them come from inside modern witchcraft, and neither one holds up. The first is that wicca is related to wise, so a witch is a wise woman. Wise comes from a different root entirely. The second is that it comes from a word meaning to bend or to shape, so a witch is one who bends reality to their will. That one gets repeated constantly and the linguistic case for it is thin. The truthful answer is that we do not know what the word originally meant, only that by the time it shows up in English it already carries the sense of someone who works harm by hidden means, which lines up with what we found in the Hebrew a couple of essays back.

So the word arrives already loaded. And then a great many people died under it.

I want to deal with the trials directly, and specifically with the question I never thought to ask when I was on the other side of this, which is whether the people who were executed were actually doing anything.

Start with the numbers. You may have heard that nine million women were burned at the stake. That figure is most certainly exaggerated. It traces to an eighteenth century German writer who extrapolated wildly from a single local record, and it got picked up in the nineteenth century and again in the twentieth by writers who had reasons to want the number enormous. It is not true and repeating probably isn’t helpful.

The historical range that working scholars use is roughly forty to sixty thousand executions across Europe, out of something like ninety to a hundred thousand trials, over about three centuries from the fourteen hundreds into the seventeen hundreds. Around three quarters to four fifths of the executed were women. The killing was not evenly spread. The German lands were catastrophic and Spain and Italy, under the Inquisition of all things, were comparatively restrained, largely because the Inquisition had rules of evidence and the local secular courts frequently did not.

Forty to sixty thousand is not nine million. It is also not a small number, and it is not an abstraction, and every one of them had a name.

Now, to the real question, were they practicing anything?

Overwhelmingly, probably not. The organized satanic witch cult, the coven that met at midnight and had a hierarchy and a devil in attendance, has been searched for exhaustively by serious historians and there is simply not evidence for it. Norman Cohn took that apart in the nineteen seventies and it has not recovered. There was no underground anti-church. It was a fantasy assembled over a few centuries by inquisitors and demonologists, written down in manuals, and then fed back to terrified people under torture who agreed to it because agreeing was the only way the pain stopped. Stop and think about that for a moment. Burning real practicing witches in league with the devil is its own problem but nothing compared to killing people out of religious fanaticism that had not done the thing they were being accused of at all.

The typical person who died was an older woman, poor, frequently a widow, frequently living at the edge of a village on somebody’s charity, often with a reputation for a sharp tongue and a recent quarrel with a neighbor. Historians working the English records found a pattern so consistent it has a name. A woman comes to the door asking for food or milk or a place by the fire. She is refused. She mutters something on her way out. Two weeks later the cow is dead or the baby is sick, and the person who turned her away is sitting with a guilty conscience that has to go somewhere, and it goes into an accusation.

That is not a religion being persecuted. That is a village doing something to a poor woman and then building a theology to explain it.

Here is the part that undid me. There were real practitioners in those villages. England was full of them. They were called cunning folk, and they were essentially the local service industry for supernatural problems. They found lost objects, identified thieves, made charms for toothaches and safe childbirths, broke curses, and told fortunes, and they did it openly and for money, and everybody knew where they lived.

They were mostly not prosecuted. In many cases they were the ones the village hired to figure out who the witch was.

Read that again slowly. The people who were actually working magic were frequently on the accusing side, and the people who died were frequently doing nothing at all.

There is one well documented case of a genuine folk practice getting converted into witchcraft, and it is worth knowing. In the Friuli, in northern Italy, the Inquisition kept running into people who called themselves the benandanti, the good walkers. They believed that on certain nights their spirits went out to fight witches over the fertility of the crops, armed with stalks of fennel. They understood themselves as the good guys. They were fighting witches. Carlo Ginzburg went through the trial records and showed how the inquisitors, over the course of decades of interrogation, slowly taught these people to describe themselves as witches instead, because the inquisitors had a category and the testimony had to fit it. It took about fifty years to complete the conversion.

That is what interrogation does. You do not find out what somebody believes. You find out what the interrogator believes, spoken back to you in the voice of the accused.

And there is one more thing about the executed that I did not know for most of my life. They were Christians. Baptized, churchgoing, catechized Christians. Their defense was almost always that they were good church people, and the way to prove you were not a witch was to recite the Lord’s Prayer without stumbling, so they practiced it in their cells. They went to the gallows saying it.

The witch trials were not Christianity fighting paganism. They were Christians killing Christians over a crime that did not exist.

The apologies have been coming, slowly and recently. Massachusetts began making restitution to Salem families in the early seventeen hundreds and only cleared the last name on the list in 2022. The canton of Glarus in Switzerland formally exonerated Anna Göldi in 2008, two hundred and twenty-six years after they killed her. Scotland, where somewhere around two and a half thousand people were executed, issued a formal national apology in 2022.

Three hundred years is how long it took, and it is not finished.

So then where do the people who call themselves witches today actually come from?

Not from those villages. That is the honest answer and I want to give it plainly.

Modern witchcraft as an organized thing begins with an Englishman named Gerald Gardner. He was a retired colonial civil servant, back from Malaya, and in 1954 he published a book called Witchcraft Today claiming he had been initiated in 1939 into a surviving coven in the New Forest that had preserved an ancient pagan religion in secret through all the centuries of persecution. He could publish it because Britain had finally repealed its Witchcraft Act in 1951, so saying you were a witch was no longer a crime.

The ancient lineage claim is likely not true. Ronald Hutton, who is a serious academic historian and wrote the standard scholarly history of this, went through it thoroughly, and what he found is that Wicca is a genuine new religion assembled in the middle of the twentieth century. Gardner built it out of a since-discredited theory about a surviving witch cult, a great deal of ceremonial magic borrowed from the Golden Dawn and from Aleister Crowley personally, the structure of Freemasonry, scraps of real folk magic, and a lot of Romantic poetry.

Which means, and this connects to everything I have written in this series, that when a modern witch casts a circle and calls the four quarters and works with elemental correspondences, she is doing the Golden Dawn. She may not know it but the similarities are there. The bones are the bones of the order that taught its beginners the Lord’s Prayer in Hebrew. Doreen Valiente later rewrote most of Gardner’s liturgy and pulled out the Crowley material and gave it the poetry it has now, and by 1988 Scott Cunningham had published a book that let people practice alone without a coven at all, and after that it went everywhere.

Denying ancient roots does not make the practice of Wicca illegitimate. Many people have found pagan practices that deeply enrich their lives and advance their spiritual evolution and empowerment and I want to state that clearly.

I said in an earlier essay that these traditions forge their own credentials of antiquity, and that the Golden Dawn faked its founding documents and invented a German adept who never existed. Gardner did the same thing. It is the same move for the same reason, which is the fear that nobody will take a true thing seriously unless it arrives with a pedigree.

But I want to say the other half of that out loud, because I think we have been dishonest about it for a long time.

A thing can be recently assembled and still be real.

The altar call, where you walk down front while the music plays, was engineered by Charles Finney in the eighteen thirties. The sinner’s prayer as a fixed formula you repeat after somebody is a twentieth century development, which makes it roughly the same age as Wicca. Sunday school starts in the seventeen eighties as a literacy program for factory children. The rapture as most evangelicals picture it comes from John Nelson Darby in the eighteen thirties. Youth group, small groups, the worship set, the church building with a stage in it, the mission trip, the tract. Not one of those is apostolic. Every one of them was invented by somebody, fairly recently, and given a Bible verse afterward.

I saw thousands of people helped at altar calls, I do not think any of it was fake or less valuable because Finney built the machinery in 1835.

Now the ethics of modern day practice, which is the part I actually wanted to get to, and the part almost nobody in my old world has any idea about. Remember, in an earlier essay I wrote that the Hebrew word that gets translated as witch refers to someone who causes harm to another either through supernatural means or by poisoning them?

The best known ethical statement in modern witchcraft is the Wiccan Rede, and it goes, an it harm none, do what ye will. The word rede is Old English for counsel or advice, and that is deliberate. It is not framed as a commandment. It is framed as the thing you were told by someone older than you who expects you to think.

Alongside it there is the Threefold Law, the idea that whatever you send out comes back to you three times over. Plenty of witches think the math on that is silly and say so. But you can see exactly what it is for. It is a deterrent, aimed at one specific behavior, which is using this stuff to hurt somebody.

I have to be honest that not everyone accepts the Rede. There are traditional and folk practitioners who consider it a modern, squeamish invention, and who hold that cursing has always been part of the toolkit and that there are people who have it coming. There have been public hexing campaigns aimed at politicians in the last several years. That is a real disagreement inside the community and I am not going to pretend it away, because the whole point of these essays is that I am done describing people from the outside.

But look at what they are arguing about. They are arguing about whether it is ever permissible to work harm. Harm is the axis. Harm is the entire question.

Which is the same axis the Hebrew was on. The word mekhashef, the word your Bible renders as witch, sat in a family of words about somebody who damages a neighbor by hidden means. Poisoner. Malefactor. The thing scripture actually names as the crime is the identical thing the modern Rede exists to forbid.

Serious practitioners will not read for you without your permission. They will not do healing work on somebody who has not asked. They will not work on a third party who is not in the room. There are long, tedious, genuinely thoughtful arguments in that community about whether you may light a candle for your own mother without checking with her first. The word they use is consent, and they mean it structurally, as a rule that governs practice.

How many prayer meetings formal or informal have been attended where the person being prayed for was consulted ahead of time? Especially if it was viewed by the people praying that the person was lost or in sin.

Nobody in that world ever once raised the question of consent. It did not occur to then that there was a question.

One more thing and then I will stop.

In the American South there is a tradition called Hoodoo, or conjure, carried by Black communities out of West African practice through slavery and into the present. It is not Wicca and it is not European and it should not be lumped in with either. Here is what it uses as its primary text.

The Psalms.

Practitioners were and are church members. They read the Psalms over water and over doorways and over people, because the Psalms are full of protection and cursing and pleading and blessing, which is exactly what the people using them needed. There were printed manuals for it. The most widely used book in American folk magic for a century was a guide to which Psalm to use for which situation.

I spent two decades warning people about the occult and never once managed to notice that a substantial American magical tradition runs on the same hymnbook I preached out of.

Perhaps the most famous voodoo practitioner in American history is Marie Laveau who lived in New Orleans in the 1800’s. She was a free woman of color and hairdresser. By her own account, she was also a devout Catholic her whole life. She went to mass. Her working tools included holy water, the rosary, and saints. It was never something else because for her voodoo and her christianity were never two different systems in the first place. She was well known for nursing the sick, sitting with prisoners on death row and praying for them as they were about to die. When she died New Orleans newspapers praised her piety and her charity.

The people who were killed were saying the Lord’s Prayer. The people demonized today are mostly making salves and asking permission first.

I do not know what to do with that except say it out loud.

Here is the passage the way I read it, in the King James, because that is the version most of us grew up hearing. There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch, or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer.

Nine things. I could not have told you the difference between a charmer and an enchanter if my life depended on it, and neither could anyone in the room, and it did not matter, because the list was not there to be understood. It was there to be feared. You read the list and people heard the word witch and the argument was over.

So let me do now what I should have done then.

The first item, passing a son or daughter through the fire, is child sacrifice, and it is associated everywhere else in the Bible with the god Molech. Hold onto that one, because it matters later.

The second is the Hebrew qosem qesamim, from the root qasam, and it means to practice divination, generally by casting or drawing something. The interesting thing about qesem is that it is not always a bad word. In Proverbs 16 it says a divine sentence is in the lips of the king, and the word behind divine sentence is qesem. The Hebrew is doing something more like inspired judgment there, and it is applied to a king approvingly.

The third, meonen, is where the KJV gives us observer of times. Nobody actually knows what this word means. The best guesses are that it comes from the word for cloud, so a cloud-reader, or from the word for eye, so something to do with the evil eye, or from a root meaning to hum or mutter. Modern translations throw up their hands and put soothsayer or fortune-teller. When the KJV says observer of times it is guessing, and later readers turned that guess into a doctrine about astrology.

The fourth is where it gets uncomfortable, and I mean uncomfortable for the position I used to hold. The word is menachesh, from the root nachash. The KJV calls him an enchanter.

That is the same verb Joseph uses about himself.

Genesis 44, the silver cup in Benjamin’s sack. The steward says, is this not the cup my lord drinks from, and by which he indeed divines. The Hebrew there is nachesh yenachesh, the verb doubled for emphasis, the exact root forbidden in Deuteronomy 18. Then Joseph repeats it in his own voice a few verses later. And Laban says the same thing in Genesis 30, that he has learned by divination that the Lord blessed him because of Jacob.

So the same practice the KJV calls enchanting, when Joseph does it, gets no comment at all. Not a warning, not a rebuke, not a narrator stepping in to tell you that this was the one flaw in an otherwise godly man. Nothing.

The fifth word is the one this whole essay is about. Mekhashef. The King James says witch.

Start with something small and strange. In Deuteronomy 18 that word is masculine. The witch in the verse everybody quotes at women is grammatically a man. It only shows up in the feminine in Exodus 22, the you shall not suffer a witch to live verse, and that single grammatical accident has cost more women their lives than probably any other four words in English.

Now the meaning. Kashaph is one of those roots where scholars are honest that they are working from cousins in other languages. The closest relative is the Akkadian kašāpu, and we know a great deal about what that meant in Mesopotamia because they left us whole ritual libraries about it. A kaššāpu was a person who harmed you by supernatural means. Sickness, impotence, crop failure, a death in the house. The Babylonians had elaborate counter-rituals against them. This is not a religious category. It is closer to a criminal one. The person is defined by the harm.

Then look at what the earliest translators did with it. When Jewish scholars in Alexandria rendered the Hebrew Bible into Greek a couple of centuries before Christ, they translated the word in Exodus 22 as pharmakous, from pharmakon, which is a drug or a potion. They understood the crime to involve poisoning. Jerome, translating into Latin, used maleficos, which just means evildoers or malefactors.

Poisoner. Malefactor. Someone who hurts people.

That is a long way from what the word witch conjured in my head, and in yours, which is a woman with a pact and a familiar and a flight to a sabbath at midnight. That picture is not in the Hebrew. It is not in the Greek. It is not in the Latin. It is a late medieval European invention, assembled across a few centuries by inquisitors and demonologists, and by the time it existed it had almost nothing to do with the Akkadian criminal who poisoned your well.

And here is a detail I find hard to get past. The most famous witch in the Bible, the woman at Endor that Saul goes to see, is not called a mekhashefah. The Hebrew calls her a baalat ov, a woman who has an ov, which is the term for a spirit or possibly the pit or vessel used to reach one. The English chapter heading in a lot of Bibles says witch of Endor. The Hebrew never does.

Now the part that actually reorganized my thinking.

James the Sixth of Scotland was convinced in 1590 that a coven of witches had raised a storm at sea to kill him and his new wife on their crossing from Denmark. He did not delegate the investigation. He sat in on interrogations personally during what became the North Berwick trials, and people were tortured and burned.

Seven years later he published a book. It is called Daemonologie, it came out in 1597, and it is a treatise arguing that witchcraft is real, that witches make pacts with the devil, and that the magistrate has a duty before God to hunt them and put them to death. He wrote it in part to answer an Englishman named Reginald Scot, who had published The Discoverie of Witchcraft in 1584 arguing that the whole thing was nonsense, that the accused were either deluded or defrauded, and, this is the part that stopped me cold, that the Hebrew words had been badly translated and meant something closer to poisoner. James names him in the preface and calls his position shameful. It is traditionally said that James ordered Scot’s book burned when he came to the English throne, though historians are careful about that claim.

He came to that throne in 1603. In 1604 Parliament passed a new and harsher Witchcraft Act under him, widening the offenses that carried death.

Also in 1604, at the Hampton Court Conference, James authorized a new English translation of the Bible. It was published in 1611 and it is the one sitting on the shelf behind me right now.

I want to be careful and fair here, because the cheap version of this argument is wrong. James did not invent the translation of mekhashefah as witch. The Geneva Bible had already used it decades earlier, and the translators he appointed were instructed to change as little as the original would permit. He did not sit down and pick that word.

But he did not have to. What he did was preside over the translation that would become the Bible of the entire English-speaking world for the next three hundred years, freezing that word into it, at the exact moment he was personally the most committed witch-hunting monarch in English history, having written the manual himself. The scholar who had argued the word was mistranslated was a man the king had publicly humiliated in print. Nobody on that translation committee was going to reopen that question.

The word and the gallows were in the same building, under the same man, in the same years.

And then the English-speaking church carried that word for three centuries, through Matthew Hopkins in the sixteen forties, and across the ocean to a Massachusetts village in 1692 where twenty people died with Exodus 22 read into the record.

Somewhere between forty and sixty thousand people were executed in Europe over roughly three hundred years for a crime built out of a word nobody could define.

So what is Deuteronomy 18 actually doing?

Read the whole chapter and not the fragment. The first eight verses are about the priests and Levites and what portion they get to eat. Verses nine through fourteen are the list. And then verses fifteen through twenty-two, which is the longest section and clearly the point, say that God will raise up a prophet from among their own brothers, and that they should listen to him, and here is how you test whether a prophet is genuine.

The chapter is not about the occult. The chapter is about who speaks for God in Israel. It sets up the two offices, priest and prophet, and the list in the middle is the contrast, the this-not-that. The nations get their guidance from these nine sources. You are going to get yours from a prophet, and here is how to tell a real one from a fake one.

The text says this itself, twice, in plain language. Verse nine says you shall not learn to do after the abominations of those nations. Verse fourteen says these nations hearkened to observers of times and to diviners, but as for you, the Lord your God has not permitted you so to do.

The reason given is not that the technique is intrinsically wicked. The reason given is that those people over there do it, and you are not going to be those people.

Which is the same reason, in the same book, given for something else.

Deuteronomy 7 tells Israel about the seven nations they are going in to dispossess, and among other instructions, it says do not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughter to his son or take his daughter for your son. Same logic, same chapter structure, same justification, which is that these are the people you are replacing and you cannot become them.

We already know how the church handles that one, because we watched it happen.

In 1965 a Virginia trial judge named Leon Bazile wrote in his opinion against Richard and Mildred Loving that Almighty God created the races and placed them on separate continents, and that the fact that he separated them shows he did not intend for the races to mix. That judge was not being eccentric. He was making the standard argument, and the standard argument was built on the Old Testament separation texts. Bob Jones University kept a ban on interracial dating on explicitly biblical grounds until the year 2000, which is not ancient history, which is after some of you reading this were married.

The church eventually decided, correctly and much too slowly, that a command given to Israel about the specific Canaanite peoples they were dispossessing does not transfer to a modern person choosing who to love. We decided it was bounded. Bounded by time, by geography, by covenant, by the specific situation it addressed.

We applied that reasoning to one line in Deuteronomy and refused to apply it to another line in the same book, and the only reason we refused is that we were still afraid of the second one.

Now let me take the obvious objection seriously, because if I do not, somebody will, and they will be right to.

Child sacrifice is on that list too. Am I saying that is culturally bounded and no longer applies?

No. And that is exactly the point I want to make, so stay with me.

The list contains something we all still condemn absolutely, and it contains things nobody has thought about in centuries, and it sits in a book that also prohibits mixed fabric and shellfish and lending at interest. Which means that being on an Old Testament prohibition list cannot, by itself, settle whether a thing is wrong. It never could. You have to give an actual reason.

And when you give the reason for child sacrifice, it takes about four words. You killed a child. That reason does not depend on the list at all. It stands on its own in any century, in any culture, in front of any audience. The list is not doing the work. The reason is.

Now try to give the reason for the divination prohibitions without pointing at the list. Go ahead and try. What is the harm being named? Who is the victim? And once you actually try to answer that, you end up somewhere very specific, which is that the problem was never the mechanism. The problem was going around God. It was trying to get leverage on the future from powers you had cut a deal with. It is rooted in a lack of trust in the very goodness of the creator and using spiritual power to cause harm to others.

That is a real spiritual danger and I still believe it is one. It is also a description of allegiance, not of technique, and it can be committed with a prayer meeting with more ease and destructive potency than with a deck of cards. I have seen it done many times and had it done to me.

If the technique were the sin, then the Urim and Thummim in the high priest’s vest would be sin, and Joseph would be a criminal, and the eleven apostles would have committed an abomination in Acts chapter one when they cast lots to replace Judas.

So here is where I have landed.

Deuteronomy 18 has nothing to say about whether a person in 2026 can pray with beads, or sit with a labyrinth, or study the Tree of Life, or look at a picture on a card and let it ask them a question. It was not written to that person. It was written to a specific people entering a specific land, telling them not to take up the cultic apparatus of the peoples they were displacing, and telling them that God was going to give them prophets instead. Oh and by the way, the best history and archeology shows none of that actually happened anyway, but let’s just gloss over that ok?

Lifting those five verses out of that chapter, past the priestly portions in front of them and the prophet in back of them, and dropping them onto a modern person’s spiritual life, is not exegesis. It is a proof text chosen out of fear of something and someone who is different.

I want to come back to that one word before I stop, though, because it is the word that did the actual damage.

Mekhashef. Every ancient reader who handled that word understood it to be about somebody doing harm to somebody else. The Akkadian cousin names a person who makes you sick, kills your animals, ruins your crop, empties your womb. The Greek translators in Alexandria heard poisoner and wrote pharmakous. Jerome heard malefactor and wrote maleficos. Harm done to a neighbor, on purpose, by hidden means. That is the crime.

So go walk a metaphysical fair on a Saturday and tell me who is being poisoned.

There are folding tables of essential oils and dried herbs. There is a woman doing reiki on a massage chair by the window. Crystals sorted by color, a man with singing bowls, three or four people reading cards, somebody selling raw honey and somebody else selling soap. The average age in the room is about fifty-five and a good number of them have driven in from two counties over. Nobody there is hexing a rival’s cattle. They are trying to sleep better, hurt less, and be less afraid, and most of them are trying to help somebody else do the same.

Mitch Horowitz has spent his career as a historian of this material in America, and his argument, put roughly, is that the thing we file under New Age is at bottom a body of practical, therapeutic, healing practice. That is simply what it consists of once you stop describing it from the outside and start describing what is actually on the tables.

And the women who now take the word witch on purpose, the ones who put it in their bio and wear it, what is it they actually do. They make salves. They keep herbs and learn what their great-grandmothers knew about a fever. They grow things. They sit up with people who are grieving. Whatever else is going on there, the center of gravity is healing, and it has been for as long as anyone has been paying attention.

The word was coined to name a person who poisons. It ended up on the herbalists.

You can buy a tarot deck built entirely around cats, where the Fool is a kitten about to knock something off a counter. There is a Supernatural deck with Sam and Dean on the cards, a Golden Girls deck, a Star Wars deck, an Office deck, a Stranger Things deck, a Disney Villains deck, a Nightmare Before Christmas deck, and, as far as I can tell, a Scooby-Doo deck, which means somewhere out there is a Death card with Shaggy on it. There is even a Zombie deck that has two necrotizing zombies embracing.

These are sold at Barnes and Noble, next to the calendars. Some of them are shelved in the humor section.

If tarot cards were what I told people they were, an instrument of contract with the powers of darkness, then the powers of darkness have a licensing department and it is doing very well.

My introduction to Tarot was at my cousin’s birthday party when we were about 12 years old. I was fascinated by it and on the way home from the party my mom casually informed me that the cards were evil and that was good enough for me case closed. I may have never given it another thought but every freedom weekend we did began with “false spirituality” and tarot cards was always on the list.

Like everything else in this series, I would discover that Tarot was not at all what I thought.

What I want to do first is explain what a tarot deck actually is, because I did not know, and I would guess most people reading this do not know either, and once you know it the whole conversation changes shape.

Every deck in that list, zombies and Golden Girls and all, has seventy-eight cards. Not seventy-seven and not eighty. Seventy-eight, arranged in a fixed pattern that none of them break, because if you break it you have not made a tarot deck, you have just made cards.

Fifty-six of those cards are what people call the minor arcana, and they are laid out in four suits of fourteen. Ace through ten, and then four court cards, a page, a knight, a queen, and a king. The suits are cups, wands, swords, and coins.

Stop for a second on that, because you already own most of a tarot deck.

The deck in your kitchen drawer, the one you played rummy with at your grandmother’s table, has four suits running ace through ten with a jack, a queen, and a king. Hearts are cups. Spades are swords. Clubs are wands. Diamonds are coins. The only structural difference is that somewhere along the way the ordinary playing deck dropped one of its four court cards, the knight, and went from fourteen cards a suit to thirteen.

The other twenty-two cards are the ones everybody pictures. The Fool, the Magician, the High Priestess, the Lovers, the Wheel of Fortune, the Tower, Death, Judgement, the World. Those are the major arcana, and they are not a suit. They sit on top of the other four.

Which brings up the history that nobody told me. Tarot was invented in northern Italy in the middle of the fourteen hundreds, and it was invented as a card game. Somebody took an existing fifty-six card deck and added a fifth set of twenty-two picture cards that could beat anything in the other four suits, and they called those cards the trionfi, the triumphs. That is where our word trump comes from. It is a trick-taking game, closer to euchre or spades than to anything spooky, and people in Milan and Ferrara and Bologna played it for fun the way people now play hearts. The oldest surviving decks were painted for the Visconti and Sforza families around 1440.

For roughly three hundred years, that is all it was. A game.

Nobody used tarot for divination until the seventeen eighties, in Paris, when a Protestant minister (read that again) and amateur scholar named Antoine Court de Gébelin decided the cards were a surviving fragment of ancient Egyptian priestly wisdom. He was wrong, completely and provably, and Egyptian hieroglyphs would not even be readable for another forty years. But a fortune teller who went by Etteilla took the idea and ran, printed the first deck actually designed for divination, and the association stuck.

Then in the eighteen fifties a former Catholic seminarian in Paris named Alphonse Louis Constant, writing as Éliphas Lévi, noticed that there are twenty-two major arcana and there are twenty-two letters in the Hebrew alphabet, and on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life there are twenty-two paths connecting the ten spheres. He mapped them onto each other, and that single move is the reason tarot became theological instead of merely fortune telling. After Lévi, the twenty-two cards are a diagram of how a soul climbs the Tree.

I want to be honest that this is a nineteenth century overlay and not an ancient design. The twenty-two trumps existed for four hundred years before Lévi came along and matched them to Hebrew letters. He found a coincidence and built a cathedral on it. That is worth saying plainly, and it is also worth saying that a great many things in Christian history got built exactly that way.

Which finally gets us to the deck that started the whole modern industry.

It came out of London in December of 1909, published by William Rider and Son, and it has sold well past a hundred million copies since. Every deck I listed at the top, the cats and the Golden Girls and Shaggy, is a costume worn over this one. Two people made it and only one of their names ended up on the box. The important thing to know is that this original deck was designed with specifically chosen symbols from the images to the colors to even the numbers. And it was considered sacred, the key to understanding the psyche, and a path to spiritual empowerment.

Arthur Edward Waite was born in Brooklyn in 1857 to an American ship’s captain who died before Arthur was old enough to remember him, and his mother took the children home to England and became a Catholic, so he was raised in the church and stayed inside the shape of it his whole life even during the years he was wandering. What he cared about more than anything he ever wrote about was the Holy Grail, and not as a legend or a treasure hunt. He believed the Grail material was the last surviving container of a real Christian mystery that the Western church had once held and then misplaced, and he wrote about it for decades, most seriously in a book called The Hidden Church of the Holy Graal. When Waite writes about the Eucharist you can tell the man means it.

He belonged to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn from 1891 and fought with them the entire time. The rest of the order wanted Egyptian gods and ceremonial power and Waite wanted Christ and the sacraments, and by 1915 the argument had run out of room, so he dissolved the organization he was leading and started a new one called the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross, and he wrote his terms into the founding documents where nobody could get at them. The interpretation of this tradition is to be a Christian interpretation. Christ is the essence of the true Rosy Cross. He gave up an entire order rather than let anyone move Jesus off the center of the table, and six years before he did it he hired an artist to paint a deck of cards.

If you can pull that deck up on your phone, find the Ace of Cups. There is a hand coming out of a cloud holding a chalice with five streams running over the rim, and descending into the cup, wings out, is a dove carrying a small disc marked with a cross. That is a communion wafer. It is the Holy Spirit coming down as a dove and the host coming down into the cup, which is to say it is the Eucharist, painted on a tarot card by a working artist who knew exactly what she was drawing.

And it keeps going. The High Priestess sits between two pillars, one dark with a B on it and one light with a J, which are Boaz and Jachin, the pillars Solomon set at the porch of the temple and named in First Kings chapter seven, and there is a scroll half hidden in her lap with the letters TORA on it. The Judgement card is an angel with a trumpet and the dead standing up out of their coffins with their arms open, which is not a symbol of the resurrection, it is simply the resurrection, drawn the way it would be drawn on a cathedral wall. And the Lovers card is a naked man and a naked woman standing in a garden, and behind her is a tree with a serpent wound around it, and behind him is a tree with flames for fruit, and above them both is a red winged angel named Raphael. Two trees, a garden, and a serpent. That is Genesis 3.

The other thing about Waite is that he had no use for fortune telling at all. He put divinatory meanings in the little companion book because that is what the publisher needed in order to sell it, and you can almost feel him gritting his teeth through that whole section. His stated position was that the true tarot is symbolism, that it speaks no other language and offers no other signs. He was not building a machine to tell you whether you would meet a tall stranger. He was building a picture book of the soul’s road home and he expected it to be read the way you read a stained glass window, slowly and while thinking about God.

The artist was Pamela Colman Smith, and for most of a century her name was left off the deck entirely.

She was born in London in 1878 to American parents and grew up between Manchester, Brooklyn, and Jamaica. She studied at Pratt under Arthur Wesley Dow and left before finishing, then spent years traveling with the Lyceum Theatre company around Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, and that is exactly why her cards look the way they do, because every one of them is staged. The figures are blocked like actors, the gestures are theatrical, the backgrounds are painted flats. She learned to build a picture in a room where people told stories out loud for a living. Ellen Terry started calling her Pixie and it stuck for good. She collected Jamaican folk tales and published them and performed them herself. She had synesthesia, so she saw color and shape when she heard music, and she would sit and paint whatever came while somebody played Bach. Alfred Stieglitz gave her a show at his New York gallery in 1907 and she was the first artist he ever hung there who was not a photographer.

Waite brought her in around 1909 and she painted all seventy-eight cards in about six months for a flat fee and no royalties, ever. She wrote to Stieglitz about the job and called it very little cash for a lot of work. She signed the cards with a small monogram down in a corner and that is the only place her name shows up anywhere on the deck.

Then in 1911, two years after finishing the most reproduced tarot deck in the history of the world, Pamela Colman Smith was received into the Catholic Church.

She spent her last years in Cornwall and died in 1951 with nothing. Her belongings were sold off to pay what she owed and she went into a grave with no stone on it. For decades everyone called it the Rider-Waite deck, after the publishing house and the man who ordered it, and the woman who drew every image anyone has ever seen went unmentioned. People have only recently started saying Waite-Smith, which is the least that could be done and it took eighty years to do it.

One more thing on the other side so this does not read as a sales pitch. The reason this deck conquered the world is that Smith drew a full scene on every one of the fifty-six numbered cards instead of just arranging cups and coins the way every previous deck had done, and she almost certainly got that idea from a fifteenth century Italian deck called the Sola Busca that had been photographed at the British Museum a couple of years earlier. So it did not come out of nowhere. She took an old idea nobody had followed up on and executed it well enough to set the standard for the next hundred years, which is how art usually works.

Now here is what I have been circling.

The verse we used was Deuteronomy 18, the one that says there shall not be found among you anyone who practices divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch. I read that out loud more times than I can count and never once asked the obvious question, which is why the same Bible describes Joseph doing exactly that and never says a word against him.

Genesis 44. Joseph has his silver cup planted in Benjamin’s sack, and when the steward catches the brothers he asks, is this not the cup my lord drinks from, and by which he indeed divines? Then Joseph says it himself a few verses later. Do you not know that a man such as I can certainly divine? That is a divining cup, water read for meaning, in the hands of the man God is using to keep the whole family of Israel alive, and the text does not flinch or apologize or attach a warning.

Then go look at what was sewn into the high priest’s vest. Exodus 28, the breastplate of judgment, and in it the Urim and the Thummim. Nobody today knows exactly what they were, probably stones or lots of some kind, but everybody knows what they were for. You asked a question and they gave an answer. It was a device for getting a yes or a no out of God, and it was not merely tolerated, it was specified, because God designed the vestments and put it in there. And when Saul comes apart in First Samuel 28, the way the text tells you he has been cut off is that the Lord answered him no more, not by dreams, nor by Urim, nor by prophets. Losing access to the divination device is presented as the tragedy.

It keeps going. They cast lots to divide the promised land. They cast lots over the two goats on the Day of Atonement, one for the Lord and one for the scapegoat, and God set that up himself in Leviticus 16. They cast lots on the ship to find out the problem was Jonah, and it worked. They cast lots to assign the priestly courses, which is how a man named Zacharias came to be burning incense in the temple on one particular morning in Luke chapter one. He drew that duty by lot, and while he was standing there the angel Gabriel walked up and told him he was going to have a son named John. An angel of God kept an appointment that had been scheduled by casting lots.

And then Acts chapter one, which I have still not gotten over. Jesus has ascended, Pentecost has not happened yet, and a hundred and twenty of them are in an upstairs room needing to replace Judas, which is the most consequential personnel decision in the history of the church. They narrow it to two men, they pray, and then they cast lots, and the lot falls on Matthias and he is numbered with the eleven apostles. The last recorded act of the church before the Spirit came was drawing lots to pick an apostle.

Solomon gave us the rule for the whole business back in Proverbs 16. The lot is cast into the lap, but the whole disposing of it is of the Lord.

So what is Deuteronomy 18 actually forbidding? Well I will cover that in an upcoming article.

I am not telling anyone to go buy a deck of cards. That is between you and God and he is fully capable of handling that conversation without my help.

What I am saying is that I put a book of pictures on a list of counterfeit spiritual practices and read that list out loud to people who trusted me. The pictures were drawn by a woman who joined the Catholic Church two years later and died broke in a grave with no name on it. They were commissioned by a man who broke apart his own organization rather than let anyone move Christ out of the center of it. One of them is the Holy Spirit coming down as a dove with the host, over a cup.

I had never looked at a single one of them.

Long before I ever read a book outside of the Bible and the popular charismatic titles everybody was passing around, I was working with angels.

Nothing scary about that. It is about as biblical as anything gets. Psalm 91 is one of the best known passages of Scripture in the world, and it says that God will give his angels charge over you, to keep you in all your ways. I have prayed that over myself more times than I could count. I still speak it over my loved ones today, and I have no plans to stop.

So keep that in mind while I tell you what is in a foundational occult ritual used by magic practitioners and witches alike.

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was founded in London in 1888. It is the order everybody means when they say the occult, whether they know it or not. Yeats was a member. So was Bram Stoker’s circle, more or less, and the woman who painted the tarot deck sitting in your friend’s living room right now. If you have ever heard a preacher say the word occult with that particular drop in his voice, this is the group at the bottom of it.

They had a graded system that took years to move through. Study, examinations, ceremonies, the whole thing. But before any of that, before a single one of the fancy parts, every new member was taught one ritual. It was the first thing you learned and the thing you were expected to do every day for the rest of your life.

It is called the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram.

Here is how it starts. You stand facing east. You touch your forehead, then bring your hand down to your chest, then over to your right shoulder, then across to your left shoulder, then you clasp your hands at your heart.

That is the sign of the cross. That is the same motion my Catholic friends make before they eat.

And while you are doing it, you say these words. Ateh. Malkuth. Ve-Geburah. Ve-Gedulah. Le-Olahm. Amen.

Or in english, “Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever, amen.” Does that sound familiar to anyone?

The ritual begins with the last line of the Lord’s Prayer. In Hebrew, while the practitioner is standing there making the sign of the cross.

Then you turn to the four directions and you seal each one with a name of God. Yod He Vav He in the east, which is the name so holy the rabbis will not pronounce it. Adonai in the south, meaning Lord. Eheieh in the west, which is what the voice said out of the burning bush when Moses asked who was sending him. And Agla in the north, which is a contraction of a Hebrew sentence that means thou art mighty forever, O Lord.

Four names of the God of Israel. Not one of them borrowed, not one of them invented, every single one of them lifted straight out of the same book I preached from every Sunday.

And then comes the next surprise…

You stand in the center with your arms out and you say this:

Before me, stands Raphael. Behind me, Gabriel. On my right hand, Michael. On my left hand, Auriel. For about me flames the pentagram, and in the column shines the six-rayed star.

Four archangels each called by name and called to stand at the four sides of you while you pray.

Michael and Gabriel are in your Bible. Raphael is in the book of Tobit, which sat inside the Christian canon for over a thousand years and is still in most of the Bibles printed on this planet. Auriel, or Uriel, shows up in the Jewish literature that everybody in the first century was reading, including whoever wrote the book of Jude in every New Testament ever printed.

Now look at what the ritual is actually for. It is called a banishing. Its entire function is to clear the space around a person of whatever is unwanted and set a boundary of divine protection on four sides.

Which is Psalm 91.

I want to be careful here because I am not saying they are the same thing and I am not collapsing two traditions together. But the intentions of the two are identical even if the words are not. A person stands up, calls on the name of God, asks for angelic covering on every side, and trusts that it holds. I did that before every service I was ever a part of long before I knew anything about pentagrams or the golden dawn.

I want to give you three more things and then I will stop, because at some point the argument makes itself.

The man whose book started all of this for me, Israel Regardie, was born to poor Orthodox Jewish immigrants in the East End of London. As a teenager he hired a private tutor out of his own pocket to teach him Hebrew. Not for school. He did it because he wanted to read the Kabbalah in the language it was written in, and he refused to settle for somebody else’s translation. When he was initiated and had to choose a name to be known by inside the order, he picked Ad Majorem Adonai Gloriam. To the greater glory of Adonai. That is the Jesuit motto with the name of the God of Israel put in the middle of it. He signed his life’s work with a confession of faith and we called him a Satanist.

Dion Fortune was the other giant of this tradition, a trained psychotherapist who came to all of it out of a clinic in London. Among the books she published is a volume of meditations on the Collects. The Collects are the prayers out of the Anglican prayer book. She sat down and wrote devotional material on the Sunday prayers of the Church of England.

And in 1915, a man named A. E. Waite walked out of that whole world and started his own order, because he had decided the interpretation of this material had to be an explicitly Christian one and the others would not agree. His constitution says it plainly, that Christ is the essence of the true Rosy Cross. When his co-leaders pushed back he dissolved the entire organization rather than take Christ out of the center of it. Whatever else that man was, he was not casual about Jesus. He was also the man who gave us the modern day Tarot deck.

One more, and this one is just a date. In 1887 MacGregor Mathers published an English translation of portions of the Zohar, the central text of Jewish mysticism. The next year he helped found the Golden Dawn, and that book became required study for its members.

They gave the initiates homework in the Zohar and made them learn the Lord’s Prayer in Hebrew. And we told our congregations they were sacrificing goats.

Now let me be honest about the other side of this, because I am not writing an advertisement.

These people lied constantly about where they came from. The founding documents of the Golden Dawn, the ones that supposedly proved an ancient lineage, were almost certainly written by one of the founders and aged to look old. There was a German adept named Anna Sprengel who authorized the whole enterprise by mail and then conveniently died. She apparently never existed. And Christian Rosenkreuz, the fifteenth century master at the root of the entire Rosicrucian story, was a character in a book, and the man who wrote the book eventually admitted he made him up as a young man’s joke.

I am not going to defend any of that. It was fraud and it was the kind of fraud that gets committed by people who are afraid nobody will take a true thing seriously unless it comes with a pedigree.

But sit with that for a second, because you know this ground better than you think you do.

The Zohar is attributed to a rabbi from the second century. It was written in Spain in the thirteenth. Scholars have known this for a hundred years and Jewish mystics went right on treating it as holy, and the greatest scholar of Jewish mysticism who ever lived defended the practice by name, calling it a legitimate category of religious literature.

The pastoral letters. Second Peter. Daniel. Half of Isaiah. The debate over who actually held the pen has been running in the academy for two centuries while the church kept preaching from all of it anyway.

So the standard we used on them was never the standard we used on ourselves. It was just a stick that happened to be within reach.

What I keep coming back to is Psalm 91 invoking God’s protection over a congregation of people I truly loved.

And a hundred and thirty years ago a man stood in a rented room in London and made the sign of the cross and said thine is the kingdom in the language Jesus grew up hearing, and called Michael and Gabriel to stand beside him.

One of us got called a man of God for it.

I have stopped being able to tell you why.

Introduction

You were born alive.

Before anyone told you who to be, something was already growing in you. Curiosity that reached toward everything. Desire that didn’t ask permission. Delight that erupted without warning. You were a wild tree, and you were growing according to your own nature, and your nature knew exactly what it was doing.

You didn’t have to figure out how to be yourself. You were. Life moved through you without obstruction. You laughed when things were funny, cried when things hurt, wanted what you wanted, reached for what you reached for. There was no gap between who you were and how you lived. No performance. No program. Just life, living itself as you.

You have done the work.

You have read the books. You have sat in the chairs, across from counselors and pastors and coaches and spiritual directors. You have journaled and meditated and fasted and forgiven. You have tried the program, the method, the practice, the discipline. You have tried harder. You have gone deeper. You have circled back and started again with a better vocabulary and a more sophisticated understanding of what went wrong the first time.

And you are still here. Still carrying the same quiet weight that no amount of working on yourself has been able to set down.

Not because you did it wrong. Not because you missed a step or chose the wrong method or gave up too soon. You did it faithfully. You did it with your whole heart, or as much of your heart as you could access at the time. Some of what you tried genuinely helped. It gave you language. It gave you perspective. It kept you from drowning during the years when drowning was a real possibility. None of that was wasted, and I am not here to tell you it was.

But you already know, in a place deeper than the language any program ever gave you, that something is still missing. You can feel it underneath the progress, underneath the insight, underneath the life you have built with all that effort. The ache is still there. You have gotten better at managing it. You have not been able to reach it.

I know this because I lived it. For over twenty years I led, taught, counseled, and built. I followed the instructions. I consumed the content. I applied myself with the kind of diligence that gets you praised and promoted and held up as an example. And I starved. Quietly, invisibly, in the center of a life that looked full from every angle anyone could see.

What I eventually found was not a better method. It was not a deeper version of the same approach. It was a completely different direction, and it changed the question I had been asking my entire adult life. I had been asking what is wrong with me and how do I fix it. The answer I found was that the question itself was the problem, and the life I had been looking for was not something I needed to build or earn or achieve. It was something I needed to stop blocking.

This book is about what I found. It is not advice. I have seen what advice does. It gives you someone else’s map and tells you to walk it, and when the territory doesn’t match the map you conclude that your legs are the problem. This book is not a map. It is a description of territory I have walked, and an invitation to notice that you have been walking it too, longer than you know, with equipment you were never told you had.

It is not a program. Programs assume you are raw material in need of shaping. You are not raw material. You are a living thing that has been shaped by other hands for so long that you have forgotten what your own shape looks like. This book will not shape you into something new. It will show you what has been growing in you the whole time, underneath everything they built on top of it.

And it is not a fix. Every fix arrives with the same assumption: something about you is broken and we know how to repair it. This book starts from a different assumption entirely, and the assumption will either relieve you or unsettle you, depending on how long you have been investing in the brokenness story. The assumption is that the part of you that none of the fixes could reach was never the part that needed fixing.

Read it with your body, not just your mind. Notice what stirs in you. What tightens. What opens. What makes you want to argue and what makes your eyes sting for reasons you cannot immediately explain. The responses your body has to these words are more important than your opinions about them.

If something here makes you uncomfortable, do not rush past it. You have been trained to be comfortable. You have spent years cutting away whatever disturbed the arrangement. Discomfort might be the first honest signal you have let through in a long time, rising from a part of you that did not die when you stopped listening to it.

If something here makes you come alive, do not rush past that either. That aliveness is not a reaction to a good sentence. It is a signal, and it has been trying to reach you for longer than you think.

Your soul does not need another fix. What it needs is something the fixes were never designed to touch, and it has been waiting for you to find out what that is.

Preorder your copy here:

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One of the events our church held on a regular basis, and one that was really popular with people, was called “Freedom Weekend.” It was crudely modeled after the ancient Christian practice of renouncing Satan before baptism, the thing new believers did at the font in the early centuries. We went through several areas where we assumed people could be afflicted in their minds and their emotions.

The first section centered on what I then called counterfeit spiritual practices. We covered everything from playing with a Parker Brothers Ouija board to shaking a Magic 8 Ball. I roll my eyes now when I think about it.

The practice we considered the darkest of all was what we called the occult. And here is what is interesting. Every piece of information I had gathered about the occult came from Christian sources, all of whom, I can see now, were just echoing one another. The word itself would conjure up images of dark magicians praying to Lucifer, or skyclad covens sacrificing around a campfire at midnight.

Then one day I picked up a book at Barnes and Noble by a man named Israel Regardie, called The Tree of Life: An Illustrated Study in Magic. Four hundred and twenty pages covering an array of topics I had never heard of. Finally I was going to find out about the occult from someone who actually practiced it, and who I would later learn is considered one of the greatest authorities on magic who ever lived.

What surprised me most was not what the book contained. It was what it did not contain. There were no invocations to the devil. There were no animal sacrifices. There were no incantations to bind anyone or harm anyone. Instead Regardie wrote about theurgy, and he wrote about being in service to God. I was not embracing the occult at that point, but I was absorbing some of what was in that book, and it led me to study more. In the place of invocations to Beelzebub, what I found was a profound reverence for and contemplation of the names of God as they are given to us in the Bible.

So what is theurgy?

The word comes from Greek roots meaning “god-work” or “divine working.” It describes ritual practice used to invoke higher or divine powers. The goal is to purify the soul, to achieve union with the divine, which the Greeks called henosis, and to attain spiritual perfection. That was nothing like what the deliverance books had told me. Not even close.

And what about the word occult?

It comes from the Latin occultus, which simply means hidden. The word can refer to secret knowledge, meaning information kept from the public, and it can also refer to the exploration of the unseen realm. It means seeking hidden supernatural or mystical forces. Which is exactly what I was doing in the charismatic world. I was seeking a God who is invisible. I was earnestly desiring to operate in the presence and power of the Holy Spirit. We were after revelation knowledge from the Spirit, revealed, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 2, to the spiritual man or woman. By that definition, the whole chapter could be called Paul’s own admission of being an occultist, and it would make me and everyone I fellowshipped with occultists too.

What I discovered in this search is that the occult was not a scary satanic practice at all. Western ceremonial magic, the thing the church taught me to call the occult, was a theology. It had a doctrine of God. It had a doctrine of the human person. It had a cosmology, a theory of how ritual works, and a graded curriculum of practice that took years to walk through. Its stated goal, in the words of its own practitioners, was the knowledge of God and union with God. Its skeleton was Jewish Kabbalah, handed down through a chain of translations you can lay out on a table with dates on them. And the theory underneath the ritual was Neoplatonic theurgy, which is the same theory that sits underneath the Christian sacraments. It had nothing to do with Satanism. The equation of the two was manufactured, and it came in three waves, and two of those waves are documented frauds.

The doctrine I was taught, and that I was actively teaching on those Freedom Weekends, is that any spiritual practice outside the sanctioned lane draws its power from demons whether you intend it to or not. That is not a biblical doctrine. It is a thirteenth-century scholastic legal category. Thomas Aquinas built it, in the Summa Theologiae, to handle a specific problem. If a man uses a charm or a figure or a set of characters and something happens, but he never once called on a demon and never intended to, how do you convict him? Aquinas answered that such a man has entered a tacit agreement with demons. Not an explicit pact. A tacit one. Intent does not matter and knowledge does not matter, because nothing else could have produced the effect.

That is the whole thing. That is where it comes from. And we inherited it without ever knowing whose it was.

So when a modern evangelical says that yoga or tarot or reiki or walking a labyrinth “opens a door” regardless of what you meant by it, that is not a doctrine derived from Scripture. That is Aquinas’s tacit pact, repackaged. It was built as a legal instrument, so that no one would have to prove that anyone had actually invoked Satan. It was never about the content of the practice. It was designed to be a category that swallowed everything, and it worked exactly as designed.

From Aquinas to the Salem witch trials, the church needed to squash any spiritual pursuit that was not under its own authority.

Then came the second wave. In 1884 Pope Leo XIII condemned Freemasonry as “the kingdom of Satan on earth.” A French writer named Léo Taxil saw an opportunity, staged a very public conversion to Catholicism, and spent the next twelve years publishing lurid exposés of a Satanic Masonic order called Palladism, complete with a former high priestess named Diana Vaughan who had seen demons play the piano. On the nineteenth of April, 1897, Taxil called a press conference in Paris, promised to finally produce Diana Vaughan in person, and instead announced that he had invented every word of it. He said it had started as a joke and there turned out to be a great deal of money in it. None of that stopped Jack Chick, and if you grew up where I grew up you remember Chick tracts, from picking the same material back up and putting it into print for a new generation of church kids.

Then came the satanic panic of the 1980s and 1990s. It was ignited by a book called Michelle Remembers, published in 1980, in which a woman under hypnosis recounted an eighty-one day satanic ritual she had endured as a small child. The book fell apart under scrutiny. Among other things, she had a perfect school attendance record for the period she claimed to have been held and abused. Then came the McMartin preschool trial, the longest and most expensive criminal trial in American history to that point, three hundred and twenty-one counts, forty-eight children, and not one conviction. Ray Buckey sat in jail for close to five years before every charge against him was dismissed. Then came the West Memphis Three, where three teenagers went to prison for the murder of three little boys, largely because one of them read books about the occult, and where the state’s own key witness later admitted she had made her testimony up. They served eighteen years.

In fact, I can not think of a single account from that time that generated the satanic panic that has not been totally discredited.

If Satan is a liar and the father of lies, then it is clear to any thinking person where the lies actually are. They are not in any serious book on Western magic. They are in the hundreds of deliverance books that flood the shelves of Christian bookstores. They are in the tattered lives of the people who were falsely accused in trials that held the attention of an entire country. And all of it was done in the name of advancing the kingdom of Christ.

Notice the next argument you have with yourself. Not with anyone else. The one where part of you wants to send the email and another part is already dreading what happens if you do. Or the one where part of you knows exactly what you should say to your kid and another part says it anyway, the wrong way, before you can stop it. You didn’t invent this experience and neither did I. Everyone talks this way about themselves without thinking twice about what the language is actually claiming, which is that you are not one thing. You are several, in the same room, at the same time, and most of your life is spent listening to which one is talking loudest.

That’s the starting point I want to work from, before we get anywhere near the strange part, because there is a strange part coming and I don’t want you to miss the ground it’s standing on.

The Self as a Household

There is a model in modern psychotherapy built entirely around that plural experience, called Internal Family Systems, IFS for short, developed by a therapist named Richard Schwartz back in the 1980s. Schwartz noticed his clients kept talking about themselves the same plural way you just did, without any prompting from him, in terms of parts. So instead of treating that language as a metaphor to translate into something more clinical, he built the model around taking it literally. A person, in this picture, is made up of parts that formed at different points across a life, usually to survive something, and those parts relate to each other the way members of an actual family do. Some manage the day to day, keeping things running and keeping anything painful out of view. Some, when the managers fail, step in fast and loud to put a fire out, whatever it costs. Underneath the managing and the firefighting sit parts that got hurt once and froze there, still carrying whatever happened, kept far from daylight because the rest of the system long ago decided that pain couldn’t be handled out in the open. Schwartz calls these exiles. The whole architecture of managers and firefighters exists largely to keep them exiled.

Above all of it sits something Schwartz calls Self, with a capital S, a steady presence more than a competing part, patient enough to sit with an exile without flinching, curious enough to stay in the room instead of rushing to fix what it finds. Healing, in IFS, has less to do with getting rid of parts than it does with a part finally deciding Self can be trusted, and letting itself stop hiding long enough to be met.

He named the model Internal Family Systems on purpose. Before anything unusual enters the picture, the baseline claim of the entire therapy already treats a person as a household rather than a single unit walking around in a body, a community with its own internal politics, working overtime to protect its most wounded members from ever being seen again.

Where the Wall Cracks

Schwartz built all of this as a rigorous, evidence based clinical model. By his own account he started as a skeptical rationalist with no particular interest in anything spiritual, and IFS is now used widely, taught in training programs, published in peer reviewed research. It was built to explain the mind, not to open a door beyond it.

And then, according to Schwartz’s own later account, he and his clinicians kept meeting something in session that would not behave like a part. Ask an actual part, gently, whether it belongs to the person sitting in the room, and it will say yes, because it does. Ask this other thing the same question, and it will almost always say no. Interact with an actual part long enough and the person usually comes out feeling the specific relief of finally being seen. Interact with this other thing, and the person often comes out drained, hijacked, worse off than before the session started. I’ve watched newer therapists spend months treating one of these as an unusually vivid protector part before anyone thought to ask it that simple question. Schwartz’s term for it is unattached burden, something that behaves like a burden a part would carry, except it never belonged to any part in the first place.

One of Schwartz’s most senior trainers, a man named Bob Falconer, spent years collecting these cases from his own practice and from clinicians across the wider IFS training world. He eventually wrote an entire book about it, called The Others Within Us: Internal Family Systems, Porous Mind, and Spirit Possession. Schwartz wrote the foreword himself, and in it he admits he was afraid, afraid that publishing a serious clinical book with the words spirit possession in the title would get his life’s work, decades of rigorous, evidence based therapy, dismissed as fringe overnight.

What that fear reveals matters more than the fear itself. Here was a purely secular clinical model, built by a skeptical rationalist and refined over decades inside peer reviewed, university trained psychotherapy, running into something it had no place in its own framework for. The founder gave it a name anyway, and let a colleague publish a book about it, at real risk to his own reputation, because the clinical evidence in front of him mattered more than the discomfort of admitting what he’d found.

The Wall That Got Mistaken for a Fact

The philosopher Charles Taylor has a name for what happened to the wall Schwartz built his career on top of. In his book A Secular Age, Taylor draws a distinction between what he calls the porous self and the buffered self. The porous self is the older picture, the one nearly everyone held before the modern world, with no hard wall between the inside of a person and the outside of one. Spirits, forces, presences could reach in and shape a life, for better and for worse, the way an unsealed stone tile soaks in whatever touches it. The buffered self is the replacement most of us inherited without ever choosing it, sealed the way that same tile gets sealed by a chemical coating, resisting whatever comes near it. A firm boundary runs between mind and world in this picture, and anything that used to be called spiritual gets relocated inside the skull and renamed psychological. Taylor’s sharpest point is that this wall was never a discovery about how people actually work. Someone built it, and then several centuries of people agreed to stand behind it until it started to look like a fact.

This keeps happening well outside IFS too, and it’s worth seeing the shape of it once. A secular field sets out to explain a person completely from the inside, ruling out anything sacred or invisible as unnecessary to the explanation. Study people carefully enough, for long enough, and the field keeps arriving back at the same locked door it was built to walk past. Psychology isn’t the only place this happens. It may be the clearest and most recent, and it happened to people with every professional incentive to explain it away instead.

Relationship All the Way Down

Porous can sound like it means the self is basically an empty container, filled by whatever happens to be nearby until no real distinction is left between one thing and another. I don’t think that’s quite right. What I’m describing is closer to this: there was never a sealed, separate unit sitting underneath all these relationships to begin with. It was relationship the whole way down, not merger at the bottom. A manager relates to an exile. An exile relates to Self. A person relates to other people, to community, to God, and none of it collapses into one undifferentiated thing the way some spiritual teaching wants it to. Every part stays distinct. Nothing gets absorbed into anything else here. What changes is only the discovery that all of it, every layer, was in relationship from the start.

You don’t need religious language to find a second example of this. Watch how an infant becomes a self at all. A baby does not build a stable sense of I am alone in a crib, working it out through quiet introspection. It gets built through being seen, held, and mirrored by another face, over and over, long before that baby has any language for what’s happening. Selfhood, at the beginning of a human life, arrives through relationship before it arrives through anything resembling solitude. This might not be a strange exception to how people work. It could be closer to the actual starting condition, with the buffered self as something built on top of it much later and mistaken for the foundation.

Guarding the Parts from Presence

The oldest story most of you already know is worth reading again with this in mind.

In IFS, protector parts exist to keep the tender, wounded parts from ever being seen again, usually by other people, sometimes even by the person’s own conscious awareness. Read the garden that way. The moment shame enters the story, the man and the woman hide. They are not hiding from an enemy. They are hiding from the one relationship in which they had, up until that exact moment, always been fully known without ever once needing to hide. Managing distance, arranging concealment, making sure the exposed part never has to be seen in that condition, this is precisely what a protector part does.

You’d expect the buffered self to have written what comes next differently. Instead, God comes looking, asking where they are, not because He doesn’t know, but because He’s already on His way in. A few lines later He’s the one making them clothes, right there inside the hiding place they built, before either of them had done a single thing to earn it.

Healed by Communion, Not Exposure

A guarded part in IFS does not get talked into standing down through better arguments or more information. It stands down when it finally trusts that Self, calm, unhurried, not looking to punish whatever it finds, isn’t a threat after all. Eden runs on the identical logic. Communion does what exposure never could, meeting a guarded part in the exact place it had assumed, wrongly, it needed protection from.

If you read the last piece I sent you about the vesica piscis, you already have the image for this. Two circles, the same size, overlapping without either one disappearing into the other, a shared space belonging completely to both and identical to neither. What changes here is the number of circles in the room. This isn’t one circle meeting one other circle. It’s a whole cluster of them, every guarded part carrying its own history, its own fear, its own reason for hiding, each with its own overlap available with the Presence sitting at the center. None of them merge into each other or lose what makes them themselves. They were only ever meant to stop hiding from the relationship the household was built around in the first place.

Where This Leaves You

You were a household long before any of this, a community of parts in relationship with each other and with something steady at the center holding it all together, not a fortress that happened to develop some cracks. Healing comes from opening those doors one at a time, not from sealing them for good, to the one relationship you were built to be found by.

Most of the voices in the spirituality and positive thinking and self help space are an echo and not a voice, and most of them do not even know what they are echoing. Find your desire. Set your intention. Imagine the end result and voila, you create your own reality. And if you are struggling? Well, you were creating your own reality the whole time. Your suffering was yours. The very reason it did not work for you turns out to be the reason you were going without anyway. It was your fear, your negative thinking, and you have been creating with it this whole time and just did not realize it. So buy our program, learn to change your state, raise your vibration, and you will finally be living your dreams.

That is the sales pitch, and it works in the marketplace. The question is whether it works in your own life.

It sells especially well right now. Our health care system is failing us, not because it lacks expertise but because it lacks accessibility. Our dollars do not stretch the way they used to and our paychecks are not growing to meet the difference. So maybe if we think positively enough we can circumvent the whole system and get what we want in spite of economic reality. That is a very attractive offer to make to people who are tired.

Want to find your soul mate? Just imagine them coming into your life and it will happen. Then go ahead and try the dating apps. How did that work for you?

And that is why the industry is growing and losing credibility at the same time.

The bind you are actually in

So you rejected materialism, and you were right to. You resonate with the idea that you have some hand in creating your own life, and you are honest enough to look around and admit that the life in front of you is not the one you wanted. Within the framework you have been handed, those two things can only add up one way. Your life kind of sucks and you are the one to blame. That is not my read on you. That is the verdict the framework itself hands you the moment you are honest about your circumstances, and you did not agree to it when you signed up.

Look at what a solo model actually commits you to. If you are creating and it is a solo project, then you are to blame for every hardship you have ever experienced. Every one. The illness, the layoff, the person who left, the thing that happened to you when you were seven and had no framework for any of this. All of it lands on you.

And there is a second cost that is quieter and in some ways worse. If you are solo creating, then you are limited to what you already know and expect and believe to be possible. That is the ceiling. Your imagination becomes the outer wall of your life. Which automatically disqualifies you from doing the impossible, because the impossible is by definition the thing you cannot currently picture. You are also cutting yourself off from your greater good. Maybe winning the lottery is not going to make your life better in all the ways you assume. Maybe finding that soul mate means a total disruption to your life that in the long run is not for your good. A solo creator has no way to receive anything better than what he already wanted.

The question that never gets answered

And of course you know people who never heard of the law of attraction. They do not do the work, they have never set an intention in their lives, and they are healthy and prosperous and surrounded by people who love them. So like WTF?

That question deserves an answer and it almost never gets one. Hold onto it. I am coming back to it.

Two roads that arrive in the same place

Here is what I notice about the options on the table. They start from opposite ends and they put you in the same room by yourself.

The materialist model says you are sealed inside your own skull. You are the product of some cosmic anomaly that left you as one more animal in an evolutionary chain, and your thoughts and emotions are a byproduct of nature evolving a little too far. By that I mean evolving into an animal that somehow knows it is going to die, so it goes looking for solace in stories and myths, only to find out none of it is real. Your thoughts and feelings and beliefs and imaginations have no torque. No effect on outcomes. You are alone in there.

The oneness model tells you the opposite and then walks you to the same place. If we are all finally one thing wearing a giant masquerade of differentiation, then there is nobody across from you. The other is a costume. And you cannot co-labor with a costume. You cannot be in relationship with something that is secretly you. It sounds like the warmest idea in the room and it quietly empties the room.

The solo manifestation model gets there a third way. If you are god and there is no other, then you are creating your reality like an all powerful genie, which sounds like a promotion right up until the moment your reality does not cooperate. Then it is just you and the mirror and the blame.

Whether we are told we are isolated inside our own skulls, or that we are all one thing in disguise, or that we are the only god in the room, we end up playing a solo in a world that is a symphony.

What is true in it

Now, I do not want to throw the whole thing out, because the thing they are echoing is real.

The idea that you can desire something and see it come about through your imagination and will and belief is as old as time. It is ancient. It keeps showing up across human history, in cultures that never met each other, in traditions that would agree on almost nothing else. That is not nothing. An idea does not survive that long by being useless. It should give us all hope and a sense that we are far more powerful than we believe, and it ought to make us curious enough to explore the latent powers in us instead of embarrassed about them.

So let me say it plainly. We are far more than we think we are. We are far more powerful than our societal narratives of secularism and materialism want us to believe. The world is much more than what we can see or hear or touch or smell. Our will and desire and belief do have far reaching effects on the physical plane. And if we can quit ruminating on our past traumas, obsessing over our shortcomings, and denying our current circumstances the privilege of permanence, then we can create for ourselves far more than we think. Our participation in creating our reality matters. We can see the impossible happen if we believe.

The error is not in the power. The error is in the pronoun.

We are not creating, we are co-creating

We are co-laboring, and that is not a limitation or a hindrance. It is a blessing.

Nothing about this life is solo. We hate to admit it, but we are dependent creatures and we have been that way since we came out of the womb. Someone had to feed us. Someone had to teach us how to walk. We depend on water and food and air and trees and weather and shelter and a myriad of other things just to stay alive one more day. You are god? You did not create this world. You did not create your mom and dad. Do you have godlike abilities? I believe you do. But when for whatever reason we feel the need to scream independence, we ought to look hard at how deeply we are denying the plain terms of our own existence. So why would we think we can create our reality independently of anything or anyone else?

What the master actually taught

This is why I am intrigued by what Jesus taught about prayer and faith, because he holds together the two things the market cannot.

Start with the verse the manifestation world quotes more than any other. Mark 11:24. Whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours. The word translated received is elabete, from lambano, which means to receive, to take hold of what is being handed to you. It is not a verb of making. Greek has verbs for making and building and creating, and this is not one of them. It is the verb you use for an open hand. And it sits in the aorist, so the receiving is spoken of as already accomplished before the asking is even finished. The single most cited proof text for creating your own reality is built on a receiving verb. Whatever else that verse is doing, it is describing a transaction with somebody.

Then look at John 14:10, where Jesus says the Father dwelling in him does his works. Menon is a present participle, so the dwelling is not a visit, it is continuous, ongoing, the condition he is always in. And poiei, does, is present active with the Father as its subject. The Father is doing the works. Yet nobody reading those scenes would say Jesus is a bystander in them. He is fully there. He speaks, he touches, he goes where he is going. Two agents, one act, and neither one gets collapsed into the other. That is the structure. Not a lone operator, and not a puppet either.

Paul gives it a name. First Corinthians 3:9, theou gar esmen synergoi. We are God’s co-workers. Synergoi is syn plus ergon, together plus work. Co-laborers. There is a word for it, and it has been sitting there the whole time.

And then the guard rail, because I do not want you to hear any of this as an instruction to sit still and wait. Mark 5:34. Your faith has made you whole. Sesoken is perfect tense, a completed action with a standing result, and Jesus assigns it to her. Your faith. Second person. He does not say the Father healed you while you happened to be nearby. Her faith mattered and it did something. All things are possible to the one who believes.

So faith is receptive rather than performative, and it is also efficacious. Both. Prayer is relational and creative at the same time. Your part is real, and your part is not the whole thing, and those two facts are not in competition.

Back to the people who never did any of this

Which brings me back to the person you know who never heard of manifestation and is doing fine.

If creating is solo, that person makes no sense and you have to either resent them or assume they are secretly doing it right without knowing. But if the field is relational, they make perfect sense. A relational world does not require your conscious participation in order to be running. Love operates in people who never named it. Honor and dependence and reception work in people who could not tell you what they are. Your friend is not beating the system. She is living inside a co-creative reality the way a fish lives in water, and she never needed the vocabulary because she never left the thing itself.

That is also why the technique never fully delivered. You were being taught to operate a world you are actually in relationship with.

We have godlike abilities, and we are meant to exercise them in a world that is relational at the root. Not solo creating our reality, but co-creating it, which means learning to walk with each other in honor and love. That is the part the consciousness teachers keep leaving out, and it is the part that changes everything about how you pray.

I went looking for demons. I found a well I did not know existed.

My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water. — Jeremiah 2:13

I was on sabbatical, sitting in a small circle on a Wednesday night at the Shrine of the Holy Wisdom in Tempe, Arizona. The group was talking about something they called a deeksha blessing. I had no idea what that was at the time, and even tonight, writing this, I had to look it up to say it plainly. A deeksha, also called the Oneness Blessing, is a non-denominational transfer of divine energy meant to quiet the mind and open a person to a sense of deep interconnection. It comes out of the Oneness University in India, and it is usually given by a certified “Giver” placing their hands gently on the top of the recipient’s head.

I remember introducing myself to the leaders as an evangelical, and I remember them saying, “Well, we are open to seekers from all paths.” Coming from the in-crowd with God, from being on the inside of the walls, I had never once thought of myself as a seeker. But I suppose that is exactly what I was.

Before the sabbatical I had been meditating on a single verse for weeks. John 1:9, where it speaks of Christ as the eternally preexistent Word who gives light to every person who comes into the world. I had gone into that season determined to explore other paths with an open mind, looking for the light that was in them instead of only the darkness I had been trained to see.

The meeting opened almost like a twelve step meeting. We sat in a circle and introduced ourselves. There was a reading from a text I did not know. Then we stood up to pray. Now, I was raised in rural America. I have prayed with groups to open meetings my whole life. But this was a little different. We prayed to God and welcomed the Holy Spirit, and then we welcomed Mary the mother of Jesus, then Mary Magdalene, then what felt like every angel I had ever heard named, and then ascended masters, Kwan Yin, and more names than I could keep track of. This unnerved me, because in the world I came from these were all demons. What kind of meeting had I walked into?

Then came the moment everyone had come for. The deeksha blessing. They were going to come to each of us, lay their hands on our heads, and release a blessing rooted in a religion I had always been told was demonic.

And then it happened. As we stood one more time in prayer before the laying on of hands, something in me opened, and I saw. There were several invisible guests in that room. I had to assume they were the beings we had just welcomed. And then there was Jesus. I looked at Him, and with real sincerity I felt I needed to apologize for being in a place where I had assumed all of this was demonic, for standing in a room I thought I never should have entered.

Instead of a rebuke, this is what I heard Him say.

“You have looked diligently inside the walls of the church, and all you found were broken cisterns that could hold no water. What you did not find was a spiritual path sufficient to quench your thirst. And I bless your journey.”

Peace filled my heart. I received the laying on of hands that night, and what came through was a transmission of power that was deeply familiar to me. The same Spirit. The same power. The same presence I had received and released in a thousand charismatic meetings before this one. That night I went home in peace, and I had angelic visitations in my dreams. I understood, for the first time, that there were other wells holding the water of life, even wells my former faith had called illegitimate.

But here is what I keep coming back to.

So many people in churches today, and so many who have deconstructed away from them, never left anything that could actually transmit living water. They never left a system that carried a tangible spiritual gift or a real encounter with the divine. For most people, Christianity is a philosophy of life. A way of thinking about the world and about meaning. It is less about experienced connection with the unseen real and more about holding the right worldview, or a set of ethics belonging to a time that thought in categories long since buried.

So most people never deconstructed from a well of living water at all. They never left a system that had God in it. Remember what Jeremiah accused his people of. Not one sin, but two. They forsook the fountain of living waters, and then they dug broken cisterns to stand in its place. Most people who deconstructed were leaving the cistern. They were walking away from the counterfeit, not the source.

How do I know?

Because if you had ever tasted the real thing, you could never again be satisfied with less than a continual participation in the waters of life, the ones that flow in the mutual indwelling of the created and the uncreated. People can testify that they cast out a demon once, or felt a blessing move through them, and then turn around and wave the whole thing off as mentalism, or suggestion, or a thought form they outgrew. But that dismissal says more about the system than about the experience. If you can set it down that easily, it was a broken cistern all along. It never held water to begin with.

And here is the part I want you to hear, wherever you are standing tonight. The existence of broken cisterns does not mean the water of life is gone. It means most people were drinking from the wrong place. The fountain is still flowing. It was always flowing. And it has never once refused a true seeker who came to it thirsty.

This month I have been exploring the concept of prayer both in my essays and in my live videos. I caught myself doing something the other day partly out of habit I am sure. I was talking to God and I raised my eyes up as though I was speaking to the God out there.

Watch yourself the next time you pray. Not the words you use. The posture you fall into without deciding to. Your eyes probably close and drift upward, even if only a little. If your hands move at all, they lift. People who have never set foot inside a church do this too, because somewhere back down the line all of us absorbed the same assumption without ever once examining it. God is up there. Prayer is the reach.

I want to look at that assumption through geometry. Not geometry as a subject you sat through in tenth grade. Geometry as the study of shape, and what a shape tells you about how something is actually built rather than how it happens to look. Once you can see the shape sitting underneath a spiritual system, you can see what that system is claiming about reality, whether it says so out loud or not. The shape most of us inherited for prayer describes a universe with God stationed somewhere else, and the whole task of the spiritual life is closing that distance. I think that shape is simply wrong, not the way a math error is wrong, but the way a map is wrong when it was drawn for a country that doesn’t exist.

What Sacred Geometry Actually Is

Sacred geometry is an old and fairly plain idea once you clear the fog off it. It says certain shapes and proportions aren’t decoration. They’re structural. They describe something true about how the world is put together, the way a blueprint describes a building rather than just decorating it.

You can watch this idea show up wherever people built something they considered holy. Egyptian temple builders worked with fixed ratios they treated as load bearing in more than the physical sense. Centuries before Euclid wrote a word down, priests in Vedic India were laying out fire altars according to precise rules recorded in texts called the Sulbasutras, rules sophisticated enough to include what we now call the Pythagorean theorem, long before anyone in the Greek world had named it that. Pythagoras and his circle treated number and shape as the actual grammar underneath physical reality, not just a set of tools for measuring a field or squaring a wall. A thousand years later, Renaissance thinkers like Kepler picked the same thread back up, convinced that the proportions in a seashell or a planet’s orbit were saying something, not just sitting there.

None of this required anyone to be primitive or superstitious. It required them to notice something that’s still true today. A cathedral holds its ceiling up because of the geometry in its arches, not despite it. The ratio isn’t a metaphor bolted onto the stone after the fact. It’s the reason the stone doesn’t fall. That’s the whole claim sacred geometry makes once you strip the mystery off it. Shape carries load, and it does that structural work whether anyone notices it or not.

Which is exactly why it’s worth asking what shape your own prayer life has been carrying, because you inherited one, whether anyone ever pointed it out to you or not.

The Self Has a Geometry Too

If a shape can be structural for a building, it can be structural for a person. I’ve spent a long time mapping the architecture of the self into three layers I call Surface, Depth, and Ground. The Surface is the version of you that shows up to work, answers the phone, gets through the day. The Depth sits underneath that. It’s the felt world, the memory, the wound, the parts of you that show up in your body before they ever show up in your thinking. The Ground sits underneath both, and it’s the layer most people are never even told exists. It isn’t another feeling to manage or another story to process. It’s the place where you and Spirit were never actually separate to begin with, the native layer, the one you were built around rather than the one you constructed for yourself over the years.

This is why it matters for a piece about geometry. If the Ground is the center a person is built around, then the Ground is also the center of the shape we’re about to draw, and where you locate that center changes everything about which direction prayer is even supposed to move. Get the center wrong and you can practice a spiritual discipline faithfully for decades and still be reaching in the wrong direction the entire time.

Two Shapes for Prayer

Picture the first shape. A single point floats somewhere outside and above you, and a line runs from your chest toward it. That’s the shape most of us were handed, whether it came through a church or a yoga studio or a book about raising your vibration. Prayer becomes the discipline of stretching that line, closing the gap, launching yourself toward a location you are not currently occupying. The self is a runway. God, or the higher, or the source, whatever word your particular version uses, is the destination. Growth means getting further from where you started and closer to somewhere else entirely, and escape isn’t a side effect of this shape, it’s the whole engine.

Now picture a different shape. Two circles of exactly the same size, overlapping. Neither one moves toward the other, because neither one is trying to get anywhere. They already overlap. The place where they cross is a real space, shaped like an almond, and it belongs completely to both circles at once without erasing either one. Nothing merges into a single undivided blob, and nothing gets diluted or dissolved. Both circles stay entirely themselves, and there is still a real third space where they are simply, already, together.

That shape has a name. It’s called the vesica piscis, and I’m not inventing it for the occasion. Draw a circle. Without changing the width of your compass, put the point down anywhere on the edge of that circle and draw a second one. The almond shaped overlap where the two circles cross is the vesica piscis, one of the oldest constructions in geometry. The Pythagorean brotherhood used it to work out the ratios behind the square roots of two, three, and five. Early Christians used a horizontal version of it as a quiet identifying mark, the ichthys, the fish symbol you’ve seen on the back of a thousand cars without knowing where it came from. Turned vertically, it’s called a mandorla, the Italian word for almond, and it’s the shape you’ll find surrounding Christ in the stone carvings above the doors at Chartres and Vézelay, Christ enclosed in an almond of light, marked as the place where heaven and earth meet rather than the place where they’re negotiating a future meeting. It’s also the geometric basis of the Gothic pointed arch. In a lot of those buildings, that shape isn’t only holding up a symbol. It’s holding up the ceiling.

This detail carries the whole argument in miniature. The overlap belongs to both circles and is identical to neither. That’s a picture of two things indwelling each other without either one disappearing into the other, and it’s a fundamentally different claim about the universe than a single point floating overhead. One shape says God is elsewhere and the reach has to travel up and out to find Him. The other says God is already at the center you were built around, and the only movement left is down and in, toward a center that was never actually missing.

The Shape in Scripture

Once you can see that second shape, it starts turning up in places you’ve read a hundred times without ever seeing it there.

Jesus tells his disciples, “I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.” Slow down on that sentence. Every clause in it describes something already living inside something else, not something moving to close a gap between two points.

A few verses later he uses one Greek word ten times in a row, as if he wants to make sure it can’t be missed. The word is menō. Most English Bibles translate it “abide,” which isn’t wrong, but it undersells what the word is doing. Menō means to stay put. To remain. To make your home somewhere and not wander off from it. Classical Greek used the same word for staying at your own house, or staying as a welcomed guest inside somebody else’s. “Abide in me, and I in you,” Jesus says, and then again a few lines later, “abide in my love,” and then again, and again, ten times over in a single short teaching. That is not the vocabulary of ascent. Abiding was never a way up and out of anywhere. It’s a way of staying exactly where you already are, on purpose, while someone else makes their home in you at the very same time.

Paul reaches for the identical shape in a single line to the Colossians, calling it the mystery finally made plain: Christ in you. Not Christ above you, waiting on your progress. Christ already inside the center, and the news itself is the fact that He’s there.

By the time Jesus prays what’s usually called his high priestly prayer, the shape gets stated outright. He asks that his followers would be one, “as you, Father, are in me and I in you.” Same claim, in the plainest language the moment allows, not a ladder to climb but two circles, already overlapping, asked only to stay exactly that way on purpose.

Jesus didn’t invent this out of nothing. He pointed at a shape that was already true and finally said it plainly enough that it couldn’t be missed.

The Whole Self, Not the Curated One

Here’s where the shape gets tested, because it’s easy to like the idea of God dwelling at your center right up until you remember what else lives down there with Him.

I have sat with people in a counseling room for a long time now, long enough to know which move they reach for first when the choice is between climbing above a feeling and climbing down into it. It’s the climb, nearly every time. They explain the feeling. Manage it. Spiritualize it. Medicate it if they have to. They pray over it from a safe distance, the way you might shout encouragement down into a well rather than climb into it yourself. Going down into the room where the feeling actually lives usually takes someone else in the room with you to make it possible. It is also the only move that changes anything.

There’s an old story that gets read as though it proves the opposite of what I’m arguing, and I think it proves exactly my point. After the man and woman in the garden eat the fruit, they hide. God does not wait at a comfortable distance until they climb back out of hiding and present an improved version of themselves for inspection. He walks into the garden. He asks where they are, not because He doesn’t already know, but because He’s already come looking. A few verses later He’s the one making clothes for them, right there inside the shame they were still hiding in, before either of them had done a single thing to earn it. That isn’t an ascent story. It’s a God who goes down and in, into the exact room a person is hiding in, and stays there with them.

If the geometry holds, that same movement is available for whatever you happen to be hiding right now. Down and in was never a strategy for reaching only the acceptable parts of a person. It was always a strategy for reaching all of them, because that’s the only kind of indwelling the shape actually allows, two full circles overlapping, not one circle sending its cleaned up highlights upward and hoping they’re received.

Where This Leaves You

God was never up there waiting to be reached. God is the center you were built around from the very beginning, and there was never a version of getting there by looking up. The reach was always supposed to go the other direction. Down, and in, toward the one place you never actually had to travel to reach.

A stranger is already there when she arrives, a traveler resting by the well, and he asks her for a drink. A little way into the conversation he tells her to go and call her husband. She says she has no husband. And he tells her that is true, she has had five, and the man she is with now is not her husband either. Then she goes back to her town and says the thing she cannot stop saying. Come and see a man who told me everything I ever did. She does not run home talking about anything she was taught or argued into believing. She runs home because someone knew her, the whole of her, including the part her neighbors used against her, and looked at her without contempt.

And that is a strange thing, when you sit with it. This woman had almost certainly been known before, in the worst way. In a small town everyone knows the woman with five husbands, and that kind of knowing becomes a weapon, the thing muttered at the market that sends a woman to the well alone in the heat of the day when no one else is around. She knew what it was to be known and have it cost her. Then a stranger knows the same history, the same facts, and none of it hardens into a verdict. He sees her, and he stays. That is the moment the water starts to move.

The living water is being known by a Presence that holds your whole history and does not turn away. It was never a better set of beliefs or the right technique for reaching the divine. It is the thing the human heart has been thirsty for the entire time, underneath the theology and the attendance and the long search for the correct practice. It is the longing to be seen all the way to the bottom and not left.

Think for a moment about what the church may not have been able to give you. It could hand you a standard. It could hand you a doctrine to affirm and a box that marked you in or out. What it mostly could not do was introduce you to a Presence who already knew you and wanted you anyway. A standard cannot do that. A standard does not know your name. It cannot see you, so it cannot love you, and being measured your whole life by something that cannot see you is a particular kind of loneliness that a great many people mistook for faith.

Jeremiah does not stop at the cracked cistern and the false peace. Further into the same book he writes down what the living water will be, and it is not a stricter religion or a purer institution. He describes a day when the teaching stops being something carved on stone and posted on a wall for people to obey. It gets written inside a person instead, on the heart. And then comes the line that carries the whole thing. They will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest. The word under know there is yada, and yada goes deeper than knowing about something. It is the most personal knowing there is, the knowing between two people who have nothing hidden between them. That is what the new covenant was always pointing at, a direct and interior knowing of the divine, personal and unmediated, with no one standing in the middle. It was never about obedience.

And the word usually translated law in that same passage will surprise you. It is torah, and torah does not begin as a rulebook. It grows out of a root that means to point, to aim, to show the way, the way you would point someone toward something out on the horizon. Torah is guidance long before it is ever legislation. So what the Creator promises to write inside a person is guidance from a Presence who knows you, pointing you toward what is life. It was never a fresh set of rules to keep.

The guidance goes one step further, and the church almost never followed it there. That guidance is personal all the way down. It never hands you the way, as though there were one road everyone walks in step. It points you toward the way for you, this life, this particular person, the one the Presence can see. A rule can only speak to the category you happen to fall into. It says the same sentence to everyone and calls that fairness. Love works the other way. It looks at the one person standing in front of it and speaks to them directly. That is why a standard could never love you. It never saw you in the first place.

So maybe the thing you walked away from was never the water at all. Maybe it was a system that kept handing you a standard and calling it a relationship, and maybe something in you knew the difference and finally refused to pretend. That thirst may be thirst for this, for a Presence that knows the whole story and stays, for guidance that is yours and not a general rule aimed at no one in particular. That water is real. It was never kept in the building, and it has been rising toward you the entire time.

The cistern has one more lesson in it, and it tends to land hard on people who have only just gotten free. The well you dig for yourself once you are out of the church can run every bit as dry as the one you left. That is where this goes next.

I am not saying this from the outside. For more than twenty years I was a pastor, and I understand this machine the way you only can after standing inside it that long, how it is built, how it runs, and what it costs the people it is supposed to serve. So what follows is not a theory I am trying out on you. It is something I know.

For a long time you probably assumed the problem was you. That is what the system trains you to assume. And then at some point you stopped assuming it, and the ground under the whole thing stopped holding, and almost everyone around you had a word for what was happening. They called it backsliding, or rebellion, or a crisis, or deconstruction. I want to offer you a different word, because the ones you were given are too small, and one of them may be close to the opposite of what was actually going on.

There is a line in Jeremiah that has stayed with me for years. The Creator is speaking through the prophet, grieving, and says the people have done two things that break the heart. They have walked away from the spring of living water, and they have dug their own cisterns, cracked cisterns that cannot hold water. Stay with the picture, because it is physical and it is exact. A spring is water that moves on its own, rising out of a source you did not build and cannot control, alive and going somewhere. A cistern is a pit you dig and seal and fill by hand. It holds water you already caught, sitting still, and the moment the plaster cracks even that seeps away into the ground. Jeremiah is describing people who left the living source and settled for a container they made themselves, and then stood over it wondering why it kept running dry.

That is the church a great many people have left, and it matters which one you think you were leaving. Leaving may not have been you walking away from the divine. It may have been you noticing that the container had cracked, and that no amount of loyalty was ever going to make a broken cistern hold living water again.

Jeremiah says something else, and he says it twice in two different chapters, the way you repeat a thing you are afraid people will miss. He accuses the priests and prophets of his day of healing the wound of the people lightly. They treated a deep wound as though it were a scratch, he says, and went around announcing peace, peace, when there was no peace anywhere. The people were bleeding, and the very ones whose work was to tend them wrapped the wound in something clean and white, pronounced it healed, and moved on to the next thing. The wound kept turning septic under the clean dressing while everyone smiled and called it peace.

If you spent a long time being told to pray harder, believe more, submit, wait on the plan, and that your doubt was the true disease, all while the real wound in you quietly worsened, then you already know what that dressing feels like. You were given peace, peace, where there was no peace. And one ordinary day you stopped believing the bandage and looked directly at the wound.

That refusal is not the behavior of someone losing their faith. It is much closer to what the prophets themselves did. A prophet is the person who will not accept the false peace, who says out loud that the wound is real and the water is gone and the pretty dressing is a lie.

So it may be that what looked to everyone like your collapse was something much closer to an awakening.

You came to inside a system that had been asking you to stay asleep, and once your eyes were open you could not talk yourself back under.

There is a story in John’s gospel that goes even further, and it belongs to anyone standing where you are standing now. A woman comes to a well in the middle of the day, alone, because she is the sort of person the respectable crowd gossips about rather than speaks to. Five husbands behind her, and now a man who is not her husband. She has carried other people’s judgment for years, the kind that follows a person around a small town. Jesus is sitting by the well, tired and thirsty from the road, and he asks her for a drink. Then he tells her that if she knew who was asking, she would have asked him instead, and he would have given her living water, the kind that becomes a spring inside a person so they never run dry again. It is the very image Jeremiah reached for, the water that rises on its own where every well that human hands dig eventually runs dry.

Now watch what she does with that, because it is the most human thing in the story and it is exactly what happens in deconstruction. The moment the conversation turns spiritual, she reaches for the argument. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, she says, and your people say the right place is Jerusalem. She wants to know which it is, which mountain and which temple and which tradition has the truth. She is standing in front of living water and she wants to settle the correct address for worship, because that is the fight she has been handed her whole life. It is the same fight you inherited. You end up arguing over which church is the real one, and which teachings are safe to hold, and who gets to decide whether you are still in or already out. Whole decades of a person’s life can disappear into that argument.

And he will not have it. He tells her that a time is coming, and is already here, when people will worship neither on this mountain nor in that city, because the Creator is spirit, and the ones who worship must do it in spirit and in truth. In a single sentence he dissolves the entire question she was fighting about. The mountain was never the point, and neither was the temple, and neither was the correct position on the disputed questions. What was always the point is a spirit meeting the Spirit, honestly, with no building and no gatekeeper standing in between.

So think about what that means for you. When you left the mountain you were raised on, you may have believed you were leaving the water. But the water was never in the mountain. It was never in the sanctuary or the statement of faith either. The living water is relationship, spirit and truth, and it was never the property of the institution that told you where you were allowed to drink.

So maybe you did not fall. Maybe, without a map and without anyone’s permission, against everything you were taught, you woke up. You felt the cistern crack, and you refused the false peace. You walked away from a mountain that was never holding the water anyway, and some faithful, thirsty part of you kept walking because it knew, underneath all the fear, that the spring is real and it was still out there somewhere.

That thirst was never your enemy. It may be the most awake thing in you.

You are the one facing surgery. Somebody at church asks whether they can put you on the prayer list, and you say yes, because saying no would be strange and because you want every bit of help you can get.

Within a day your name and your diagnosis have traveled to a few hundred people. A handful of them know you slightly. The rest have never laid eyes on you, and every one of them means well. They read your name in an email on a Tuesday, or they hear it read out loud in a room you are not sitting in, and for a moment each of them holds the only piece of information about you that anybody bothered to give them, which is that your heart is bad enough to be cut open.

They are not holding you. They cannot hold you, because they have never seen your face. They are holding the problem, because the problem is the only thing they were handed.

You did not set out to gather three hundred people around the thing you are most afraid of. That is what happened anyway.

The verse everyone quotes

There is a verse underneath all of this, and it gets read at prayer meetings so often that people can finish it from memory without ever having looked at it.

Again I say to you, that if two of you agree on earth concerning any matter that they ask, it will come to be for them from my Father who is in heaven. And where two or three have been gathered into my name, there I am in the middle of them.

In English you can read that a hundred times and never catch what it is saying. The Greek does not give you that option.

The word translated as agree is symphōneō. It is built out of syn, which means together, and phōnē, which means sound or voice. It is the word that gave English the word symphony. Two people sounding the same note.

That word matters more than anything else in the sentence, because an agreement of that kind cannot be reached in the abstract. You can consent to a proposition without a single thing happening, and people do that every day of their lives. What you cannot do is make a symphony out of silence. If two people are agreeing in the way this verse means, then something is being sounded, and whatever is being sounded is what they have agreed on. So there is a question sitting inside this verse that almost nobody asks. What is it that these two people are sounding?

The word for ask is aitēsōntai, and it sits in the middle voice. Greek has three voices where English has two. The middle is the voice a Greek speaker reached for when the person doing the action is also standing inside the result of the action. The active form of that same verb was sitting right there, available, and it is the form you would use for a clerk carrying somebody else’s request across a counter to a manager. It is the form you would expect if Jesus were describing intercession the way the church has practiced it for a hundred years. He did not use it. He chose the voice that means asking for something you have skin in.

Somebody who took a year of Greek will tell you that the middle and the active of that verb sometimes blur in common usage, and that the middle should not be pressed too hard. That objection would carry weight if the middle voice were the only evidence here. Look at what else is in the sentence.

The promise is genēsetai, from ginomai, which is the verb of coming into being. It will come to be for them. Something comes into being, and the agreement is what it comes into being out of.

And verse nineteen has never once been able to stand up by itself. Verse twenty finishes the thought. Where two or three have been gathered eis to emon onoma, into my name, which describes movement into the name rather than residence inside a name they already occupy. And then ekei eimi en mesō autōn, there I am in the middle of them. The Presence is not overhead somewhere receiving paperwork. The Presence is in the space between the two people who are sounding, which is the only place a symphony has ever existed.

Four features of one passage, and every one of them is saying the same thing. Two people, on the ground, in bodies, facing each other with something sounding between them, and both of them standing inside the outcome of their own asking.

Who those two people actually are

Verse nineteen does not open a paragraph. It closes one, and the paragraph it closes is the part the church leaves out when it quotes the verse.

The verses right before it are the ones about a person who has wronged you. Go to him alone. If he will not listen, bring one or two others. If he still will not listen, take it to the assembly. The entire passage is a procedure for two estranged people to walk back toward each other until they can look one another in the face again.

And then Jesus says, again I say to you, that if two of you agree.

The two who agree in verse nineteen are two people who were at odds and have gone through the labor of reconciliation. That is the setting the promise came out of. The prayer of agreement, in the passage that gave us the phrase, is the fruit of a relationship somebody paid for.

Nobody on a prayer chain has done verse fifteen, and nobody on a prayer chain ever could.

What is actually sounding

Two people can pray identical words over the same surgery and be doing opposite things.

One of them is holding the problem as the real thing and holding the prayer as a hope thrown in the general direction of the problem. The damaged heart is solid and factual and located in a body. The healing is a wish, it is somewhere out ahead of them, and it may or may not show up. The other one is holding the healing as the real thing and the damage as a temporary condition that has not caught up yet.

You could not tell those two apart by listening to them. The difference is sitting underneath the words, in what each of them is carrying while the words come out.

Most people have never once examined which of the two they are, because nobody ever told them there was anything there to examine. Prayer came to them as a request. Requests are made out of words. So they gave their attention to the words, and while they did that the imagination went wherever fear had already sent it, and the picture in the body while the mouth was moving was a picture of the thing going badly.

The picture is the note. The words are the program in your lap, and nobody in the room is listening to the program.

Which means a person can say the right words and conceive the wrong thing in the same breath.

Somebody prays for you. They ask that the surgery go well, that there be no complications, that you come home whole. Nothing is wrong with any of those words. Underneath them, in the place where that person is actually looking, they are seeing you in a hospital bed with tubes running out of you. They feel that you are in trouble. They feel that you need help. Compassion has a shape to it, and the shape is a person who is lacking something.

Try it on yourself. Say no complications and watch what shows up in front of you. The imagination cannot do a negative. To get to no complications you have to build the complications first and then cross them out, and the crossing out happens up in the words while the building happens down in the picture. Nothing ever gets crossed out down there.

So the words travel in one direction and the conception travels in the other, and the verse already told you which of the two the Father is answering. The promise is genēsetai. It will come into being. Coming into being is what happens to whatever has been conceived, and conception has never once taken place in a mouth.

That is the mistake underneath the whole business. People believe the words are the prayer. The words are the last thing that happens and the thinnest part of the whole event, and they cannot carry what has been put on them.

Agreement runs in whatever direction you point it

Look again at what the verse actually promises. It never says that agreement gets God’s attention. It says that what two people agree on comes into being. Agreement is generative. That is the entire claim, and it is the only reason anybody ever thought the verse was worth quoting in the first place. A generative thing does not stop to check your intentions before it runs. It runs in the direction you point it.

So when three hundred people take up your diagnosis, and hold it in their minds, and feel in their chests that this is a real and serious and frightening thing, they are not sending nothing. They are agreeing. Attention is going out of them and intention is going out of them, and both of those are shaped like the problem, because the problem is the only thing anybody gave them to shape it with. That is energy added to your situation, and it is added on the side of the thing you are afraid of.

Not one of them wants that. Every one of them would be horrified to hear it said out loud. Wanting has nothing to do with it. A note played by three hundred people is loud whether or not the players understood the tune they were handed.

What Harvard measured

In the last piece I made the case that the largest prayer study ever conducted never tested prayer. There is a detail from it I left out, because it belongs to this essay instead of that one.

The intercessors were not turned loose to pray however they liked. Three congregations were recruited, they were given each patient’s first name and the first initial of the last name, and they were instructed to include a specific phrase in what they prayed. They were to ask for a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications. They prayed anywhere from one to four times a day, for fourteen days, starting the night before the operation.

Now look at what the study measured. The primary outcome was the presence of any complication within thirty days of surgery.

Three congregations were required by protocol to hold the word complications in their mouths on behalf of a stranger, as often as four times a day, for two weeks.

The word no was standing in front of it every single time. A mouth can put the word no in front of anything at all. The imagination has never been able to do it.

Among the patients who were prayed for and did not know it, complications occurred in 52 percent. Among the patients who were not prayed for at all, complications occurred in 51 percent. Among the patients who were told that a group of strangers was praying for them, complications occurred in 59 percent. That difference reached statistical significance, and it is the only statistically significant finding in a study that cost 2.4 million dollars.

The note that was sounding is the note that came back. It came back in the group that knew and it stayed away from the group that did not know, because knowing is what allowed those patients to join the agreement. Six hundred and one people were told that strangers were sounding something on their behalf, and their bodies answered inside of thirty days.

That is seven percentage points, and it is what adding energy to a problem looks like once somebody puts a number on it.

The authors wrote a sentence into that paper that has been sitting there for twenty years while everybody quoted the rest of it. They state that their findings say nothing whatsoever about prayer offered by family and friends, and speak only to intercessory prayer offered by strangers.

The other way

Every feature of the verse has an exact opposite in what those researchers built, and they built it without meaning to.

The intercessors and the patients were strangers, so there was no relationship and nothing that could be reconciled. The patient was a first name and an initial, so there was no face to be gathered toward. The people praying had nothing at stake in the outcome, so the asking was active and never middle. And the note they were required to sound was the diagnosis.

Turn every one of those around and you have the thing the verse is describing, and you did not need a technique or a teacher to get there.

Two people who can see each other. Both of them with something at stake in what happens, which is exactly what the middle voice is doing in that sentence. Both of them holding the same outcome at the level of feeling, because feeling is the level where a thing is real to you or it is not, and no amount of correct wording will move it from one column to the other. And the Presence standing between them instead of filed somewhere above them.

Henry Corbin, a French scholar of Persian mysticism, needed a word for a mode of perception that is neither sense perception nor make believe, and he built the word imaginal to hold it apart from the word imaginary. The imaginary is what a person invents. The imaginal is a real order of things, perceived by a faculty that most modern people have allowed to go slack from disuse.

Two people entering the same imaginal reality, on the earth, in bodies, with the Presence between them. Both of them seeing the outcome and feeling it as the solid thing in the room. The damaged heart is still in the room and nobody is pretending otherwise. It is simply not the note being played, because it is the temporary condition, and the outcome is the thing coming into being.

None of that is a method somebody invented and sold. It is a description of what the verse already says, in the words that are already in it, once you stop reading it as a form to be filled out.

So you know now what you are handing several hundred well meaning strangers when your name goes on that list, and you know what to ask for instead. Ask for one person who can look at your face. Somebody with enough at stake in what happens to you that the answer is going to land on them too, who will sit there with you until the two of you are seeing the same thing and it has gone real for both of you.

The number in the verse is two. The church has spent a century trying to improve on that number by adding zeros to it, and the study that was supposed to settle the question of prayer forever ended up measuring what happens when you do.

Two people, one sound, and the Presence standing in the middle of them. That is the whole thing, and it is available to anybody reading this!

I have not written in a while. The worst wildfire in the country is burning in my community right now, and it is one of the worst on record anywhere. I have spent part of the last two weeks sitting with families who were displaced by it and with families who watched their houses go. It is summer vacation and with both of my kids in high school now, I have become aware in a way I was not before that the time I have with them at this age is measured in months, not years. So I have been taking it.

What happens when a community goes through something like this is that everyone starts offering their thoughts and prayers. I have heard the phrase a lot in the last fourteen days. It sent me back into a topic I have circled my whole adult life.

I have probably read more books on prayer, from more traditions, than on any other subject. Admitting that in public probably makes me sound like a boring man. What I will also admit is that during the height of my deconstruction years I did not pray at all. Not once, and not out of bitterness. I wanted to know whether prayer actually did anything unique or if other practices did the same work, or whether some of them did the work even better. I ran the experiment on myself with the same honesty I would want from anyone else running it.

The complaint

The single most durable objection to God, to the church, and to religion of any kind, is unanswered prayer. I have heard some version of it from hundreds of people over the last 25 plus years. If God is out there, why does nothing happen when I ask?

It is a fair question. It is such a fair question that people with grant money have gone looking for the answer.

In 2006, the largest and most expensive study on prayer ever conducted was published under the leadership of Herbert Benson at Harvard. It cost roughly 2.4 million dollars and enrolled 1,802 coronary bypass patients across six American hospitals. The patients were divided into three groups. One group received intercessory prayer and was told they might or might not receive it. One group received no prayer and was told the same thing. The third group received prayer and was told plainly that they would.

The people doing the praying came from three Christian congregations. They prayed for fourteen consecutive days beginning the night before surgery. They were given each patient’s first name and the first initial of the last name. Nothing else. The outcome the researchers watched was postoperative complications within thirty days.

The result was nothing. Prayer made no measurable difference either way.

The only statistically significant finding in the entire study ran backwards. The patients who knew they were being prayed for did slightly worse than the ones left uncertain. The speculation about why is interesting on its own. A patient who is told that strangers are praying for him may conclude that he is in more trouble than he thought. That says something about the power of belief on outcomes, and it is worth an article of its own, but not this one.

There have been many other studies asking the same question, and most of them find little or no effect. I will say that anyone who understands how academic publishing actually works has reason to hold all of these results loosely, in both directions. Studies that confirm what a field expects have an easier time getting printed than studies that do not.

But set the methodology aside. The Benson study matters for a simpler reason. It describes what millions of people have already lived.

While a lot of people surveyed will tell you they can name a time a prayer was answered specifically, most people wonder if their prayers make any difference at all. And as for the answers to prayer that people claim to have received? Well, skeptics have an explanation ready. They call it probability, and when probability does not cover it, some of them reach for clinical language. Apophenia, the perception of meaningful connection between unrelated things. Pareidolia, the mind that finds faces in clouds and voices in static. The suggestion is that the person who prays and receives an answer is not a believer. He is a patient.

What was actually tested

Here is what has held my attention for a very long time. What Jesus taught about prayer, and what the Christian tradition in it highest and best forms has meant by the word has almost nothing in common with what those studies measured. This is not a discovery I made late. I noticed it early and I have never been able to unsee it.

Look at what Jesus said as just one example:

“And when you pray, do not use vain repetitions as the heathen do. For they think that they will be heard for their many words.” (Matthew 6:7)

From most of my experience with pray-ers, and I mean the people and not the words, most very much believe that more is more. More words, more time, more people, more volume. Assign seventy strangers to a man in a hospital bed and surely something will move.

The Greek word for prayer here is proseuchē. It is a compound. The first part, pros, describes a relational orientation. The second part, euchē, originally meant a vow made toward someone, or a wish set in the direction of someone.

Both of those have to be present before the word applies at all.

Pros is the same word John uses in the opening line of his gospel, when he says the Logos was with God. Greek scholars will tell you the term implies a face to face relationship, a turning toward. That is not the same posture as flinging words into the sky and hoping the signal reaches an old man somewhere up and out there. It is a completely different orientation. In pros, doubting that you have the attention of the other one is like doubting you have the attention of your friend across the table at coffee. The question does not come up, because you are looking at each other.

Euchē implies a real exchange. A commitment to the process, and I would say a commitment to the answer. It carries heartfelt wish, desire, something close to ambition. I heard a preacher say once that if it does not move you, it will not move God. He was closer to the Greek than he knew.

So when 1,802 patients received fourteen days of words spoken over a first name and a last initial by people who had never met them, what was being tested was not prayer. There was no pros in it. There was no face and no turning. There was no euchē in it either, no vow, no desire, no skin in the game. What was measured was recitation aimed at a name on a list. The study did exactly what it set out to do, and it found what was there to find, which was nothing.

This clearly would not have surprised Jesus in the slightest since he already told us not to expect anyone to hear these kinds of prayers.

Why this matters

So what is this article for.

Partly it is here to open the topic. Mostly it is here to suggest something most believers and especially preachers are afraid to say outloud. What most of us were taught to call prayer may not have been prayer at all. And if that is true, then the thing people deconstruct from, and the thing a great many people never managed to believe in to begin with, was never the real thing at all.

That does not mean there is no God. It may mean the opposite. It may mean that the failed studies and our own long private failures with prayer have been pointing us toward the real divine the entire time, by clearing away everything that was never it.

Over the next month or two I want to keep pulling on this thread. What prayer is. What prayer is not. Why the difference is not a technicality but the whole thing.

I will ask you something to start.

Think of a time you prayed and something happened, or a time you prayed and nothing did. Not the doctrine you were handed about it afterward, but the moment itself. Where were you facing when you prayed? Were you speaking toward someone, or were you speaking upward into the air?

I would like to hear about it.

We have spent this whole series breaking out of a prison. We fired the false god, we saw through the demiurge, we named the archons that keep a person asleep, and in the last essay I told you that the materialist world you land in after deconstruction is the demiurge’s cleanest cell. So you would be forgiven for thinking the way out is obvious by now. Get free of the cell, walk out, breathe.

But I have not told you yet what the cell was really made of. And until you see that, you will keep escaping into another version of the same room.

The Gnostics got one thing wrong, and almost everyone since has gotten it wrong in their own direction. They thought the prison was matter. The body, the dirt, the world of things, the whole heavy material order. They thought it was the cage, and so the spark’s only hope was to climb out of it and rise back to the realm of light. I have said a few times across these essays that I think they got the cure backwards, and now I can tell you exactly what the mistake was, because it is the same mistake the modern world made by the opposite road.

The prison was never matter. The prison is the belief that matter is dead.

Stay with that for a second, because once you see it you cannot stop seeing it. The Gnostic and the modern materialist are the same heresy wearing opposite faces. They disagree about everything except the one thing that matters most, and on that one thing they are in perfect agreement. Matter is dead. The world is base and inert, mere stuff, lifeless clay and nothing more.

And then they part ways, and the parting looks like a vast disagreement, but it is only two reactions to the same corpse. The Gnostic looks at the dead world and says escape it, climb out, the spark does not belong here, it belongs up there in the light, away from all this rotting matter. The materialist looks at the very same dead world and says accept it, there is nothing up there, there is nothing else anywhere, the spark you think you feel is a flicker of chemistry that will go out, and the dead world is all there ever was.

One flees the body and one moves in and makes it comfortable, but they are both standing over the same corpse, both certain it is a corpse, and that certainty is the prison. Not the matter. The verdict on the matter.

And the verdict is a lie. The world is not dead. That is the recognition this whole series has been walking toward, and I think it is the most important thing I have to say to you.

There is a third door, and neither the demiurge nor the materialist will let you see it, because the whole structure of their power depends on you believing the world is a corpse. The third door is this. Matter is alive. The world is ensouled, awake, shot through with presence. The tree is not a furniture component that has not been cut yet. The ground under your feet is not inert. The body you are reading this with is not a wet machine that briefly hosts a ghost. The whole humming creation is alive, and it has been alive the entire time you were taught to treat it as dead.

I am not speaking poetically. I mean this as plainly as I have meant anything in these essays. The disenchanted world, the dead-matter world, the world as a heap of lifeless stuff governed by nothing, is not the sober truth that the grownups finally admitted. It is a strange and recent idea, and most human beings who have ever lived would find it the bizarre belief, not the obvious one. We did not discover that the world was dead. We were talked into it.

And the moment the world comes back to life, the spark changes meaning entirely.

For five essays I have been calling it the spark, the divine thing in you that you forgot you were carrying, and I have let the Gnostic frame color it, the spark as a fragment of light trapped in clay, homesick for somewhere else. But that was never what it was. That was the dead-world reading of it. In a living world the spark is not a prisoner at all.

The spark is the place where the living world wakes up and knows itself. It is your point of contact with the Presence that was in the world the whole time. The Gnostics felt it and read it as a captive longing for the exit. I can finally tell you what I think it really is. It is not your ticket out of the world. It is the living world recognizing you from the inside, and you recognizing it back.

That is what it means for the spark to awaken. The awakening is not a launch upward, out of the body and the dirt and the dailiness, toward some pure place above the sky. It is the lights coming on in a house you had been told was abandoned, and walking the rooms, and slowly understanding that you live here, that you have always lived here, and that you were never once alone in it.

And now, at the very end, watch your two gods finally come apart, which is where this whole thing started and where it has to finish.

The false god, the one who watched and threatened and demanded and kept score, was always the god of the dead world. Think about how he had to rule, from outside and from above, by command and surveillance and the constant threat of punishment, because that is the only way you can govern dead matter, from the outside in. A dead world cannot be trusted to move rightly on its own, so it needs a ruler standing over it with a rod, watching for the first wrong move. That is the god of disenchantment. He is a watcher posted over a corpse, and the corpse is the world he convinced you that you live in.

The other God was never like that. The God I knew since I was a child, the one who was present in the valley, the one I met rather than merely believed, was always the God of the living world. He did not rule from above. He was the presence within. He did not watch the world from outside it like a warden. He was awake inside it, closer to me than my own breath, the life in the living things and the knowing in my own chest.

And this is the part that took me so long to understand. I had that God the whole time. I never lost him. What I did not have was a world alive enough to hold him. I had been handed a dead cosmos, and there was no shelf in a dead cosmos for a living presence, so the only place I could set the God I actually knew was up on the demiurge’s shelf, next to the watcher. And the two of them got fused there, the living presence and the dead world’s warden, pressed into one name, one God, and I could not for the life of me understand why the God who held me in the dark was the same God who terrified me. That was my two God problem. It was never two gods. It was one living God I kept trying to store in a dead god’s house.

The series ends when the world comes back to life, because that is the moment the two finally separate and stay separate. One of them rules a dead world from the outside. One of them lives in a living world from within. They were never the same, and the only thing that ever made them look the same was the corpse I had been taught to see instead of a world.

This comes to its sharpest test at the one place every one of us eventually wants an answer, which is death. And here, one more time, you will be handed the same dead-world heresy wearing three different faces.

The first says death is a courtroom. You stand before the bench and a verdict is read over you from outside, the judge deciding what you were worth. That is the god of the dead world ruling one last time, from above, by sentence, exactly the way he always ruled. The second says death is lights out, the small flame of your awareness going dark, you erased into nothing, because in a dead world a brief accident of chemistry is all you ever were. The third, the gentlest sounding of them, says death is merging into the One, your little wave sliding back into the ocean, your separate self finally dissolved into the All.

Notice what all three of them quietly agree on, because it is the same thing the dead world has been telling you your whole life. The particular, embodied, related you was never the real thing. The courtroom keeps you, but only as a defendant to be judged. The other two erase you outright, one into emptiness and one into everything. All three are exits from this life rather than a deepening of it. All three say the communion was temporary, a thing that happens for a while and then stops.

And that is the one thing I no longer believe.

I am not going to hedge it, because I have reached a place where hedging would be its own kind of lie. In a living world, where the Presence at the heart of things is Other and the realest thing in the whole of it is communion, the truest thing about you is not a charge to be tried, not a drop to be poured back into the sea, not a candle to be blown out. The truest thing about you is that you are someone, in relationship, known and knowing. A living world does not deal in the kind of erasure those three endings promise. Communion is not the sort of thing that runs out.

So I will tell you what I believe, and I will tell you plainly. The soul goes on, as itself, the particular one you have been. Death is not an ending of you but a deepening of the communion, the realest thing here carried through and forward, on the far side of a door we cannot yet see around. I cannot draw you the map of that country, and I do not need to. It is enough to know that the love does not end, that the One who has been with you in the living world does not let go at the threshold, and that you cross it as yourself, whole and known and still entirely you.

So this is where I leave you, and it is the opposite of where the demiurge and the materialist both wanted you to end up. You do not have to climb out of your life to find God, and you do not have to make peace with a dead world where there is no God to find. You wake up inside the life you already have, in the body you are already in, on the living ground you are already standing on, and you turn toward the Presence that has been here, in it and under it and within it, since before you had a name for him. And you stop being afraid of the door at the end of it, because the One who meets you on this side will be the One who meets you on the other.

You fired the false god. You walked out of the cell. And you stepped, without ever leaving the ground, into the only place you were ever looking for. It was here the whole time. The world was never the prison. It was the home. It was alive the whole time, and so were you, and so is the love that does not end at the door.

If you enjoyed reading this please consider subscribing for more.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-divine-wilde-conference-tickets-1992599417497

I want to share something with all of you that I’m genuinely excited about. This September, we’re hosting our very first conference, in New Orleans.

For 37 years I’ve been on a road of personal growth and spiritual evolution. Helping others heal and live their best lives has been the all-consuming passion of my life. I spent 25 years in healing ministry that spanned multiple continents. I earned degrees in psychology and clinical mental health counseling and trained in hypnosis and NLP, and for the last decade I’ve worked professionally as a counselor with literally thousands of people. Alongside all of it I’ve gone deep into the spiritual and the experiential: working with shamans, doing psychedelics, studying the occult, and exploring all sorts of energy work and meditative techniques.

What I’m bringing to this retreat is something else entirely. It’s a body of work I developed over this past year, and I’ll say it plainly because it’s true: you are not going to find this anywhere else. It didn’t come from one tradition. It came out of everything I just named, finally pulled together into something that works.

Over three days I’m going to hand you a system simple enough to learn in a weekend and carry home for good. You’ll learn how to heal yourself. How to work with your own energy instead of being run by it. You’ll discover your authentic self, the one underneath everything you’ve built to get by, and you’ll learn how to actually live as that person. And maybe the part that matters most to me: you’ll learn how to be in relationship with God, not just talk about God from a distance.

I am going to get into the “how to’s.” Too many talk about the what and leave the how as vague. And what we will cover over these three days is something that is not really being taught anywhere else so it will actually be something new refreshing and empowering but at the same time it is synthesized from the best of the past and the latest cutting edge research in science.

You won’t leave with a binder of information. You’ll leave having lived through something that can change the way you move through the world, and your whole life with it. I know that’s a big thing to promise, and I know it’s the kind of promise you’ve heard before that turned out to be mostly noise. So I won’t keep insisting on it. I’d rather let the weekend speak for itself.

And we get to do all of this in New Orleans, which may be the most spiritual city in the country.

Here’s how it lays out:

September 23–26, New Orleans

• Wednesday the 23rd: we’ll gather for an optional riverboat dinner and jazz cruise to ease into the weekend

• The 24th through the 26th: three full days together, given over to healing and transformation

• Each evening: more optional things to do out in the French Quarter

Seating is limited, and there’s an early-bird rate if you sign up soon.

If you’ve tried everything and still come away empty, or if you do this work yourself as a healer or shaman or therapist, or if you just feel something pulling you toward it, I’d love for you to come.

Across the last four essays we have been doing one thing, slowly. We have been firing a god, the blind one, the jealous one, the one who watched and threatened and kept score and demanded that you perform your devotion or pay for it. We followed him from my own two gods to Marcion to the Gnostic demiurge to the false authority Jung found installed inside the human head. And if you have been nodding along, you have probably already done some of the firing yourself. You walked out of the building, you stopped performing, and you took back some of the parts of yourself the god had condemned.

I want to say plainly that this is good work and it is hard and most people never find the courage to do it.

I also want to say, just as plainly, that it is the easy half.

Almost nobody tells you this on the way out. Firing the false god does not automatically put you in contact with the real one. It just empties the room. And an empty room does not stay empty. Something moves into the space where the old god used to stand, and for a lot of us the thing that moves in wears the name of freedom but feels like a flat, disenchanted, strictly material world where there is nothing on the other end of the line at all. You stop bowing to the watcher in the sky and you quietly conclude there is no sky, that matter is all there is, that you are a clever animal briefly lit up between two stretches of nothing. And you call that freedom, because at least no one is judging you anymore.

I want to slow down here, because I am not mocking anyone who landed there. I lived in that room too. A lot of the most honest people I know live there right now, and they got there by refusing to lie to themselves, which I respect more than I can say.

But I have to tell you what I think that room really is.

The Gnostics thought the prison was matter. They thought the body and the material world were the demiurge’s handiwork, the cage the spark had to escape, and so the whole project was to shed the flesh and rise back up to the realm of light. I told you a couple of essays ago that I think they got the cure backwards, and this is where I want to say exactly why.

The prison was never matter. Matter is good. Your body is good. The dirt and the blood and the skin and the bread and the people you can reach out and touch are not the cage. The cage is not matter rather I think it is a philosophy about matter. The cage is the belief that matter is all there is, that the world is dead stuff and nothing more, that there is no spark in you and no Source above you and no living Divine presence anywhere in the whole humming cosmos. That belief is the prison the myth was really pointing at, and here is the part that should stop you cold. It is the prison most deconstructed people walk straight into the day they think they got free.

Strict materialism is the demiurge’s cleanest cell. It is cleaner than the church ever was. The old religious cage at least kept a rumor of the sacred alive. It pointed, however badly, at something beyond the walls. The flat material world removes even the rumor. It does not forbid the Pleroma. It convinces you there was never any such thing, that the longing you feel for it is a chemical accident, that the spark you half remember is a story you told yourself. The demiurge never needed a sanctuary and a tithe to rule you. He just needed you to forget you had a spark at all, and a disenchanted life hands him that forgetting for free.

And the cell has guards. In the old myth the demiurge did not rule alone. He set rulers beneath him, the archons, lesser powers whose only job was to keep the sleepers asleep and to block any spark that tried to rise. You do not have to believe in literal cosmic wardens to recognize them, because they run the disenchanted life on a tight schedule. They are the endless distraction that never lets a quiet moment open. They are the irony that makes sure nothing is ever allowed to be sacred. They are the low hum of consumption that keeps the ache fed so you never have to ask what the ache is for. And the cleverest of them is the reasonable inner voice that explains away every flicker of presence before you can turn and look at it. None of them have to forbid the encounter. They only have to keep you too busy and too defended to ever go seeking it. That is how a free person stays imprisoned without a single rule on the books.

So you can walk out of the church and remain every bit as captive as you were inside it. More, even. Inside, you at least suspected there was a real God behind the false one. Outside, in the flat version, you stop suspecting anything. You are no longer ruled by a god you can see. You are ruled by a story about reality that you mistook for reality itself, and that is mythic rule of the most total kind, the kind you cannot even name because you no longer believe in myths.

This is where the Gnostics put their finger on something the church spent centuries trying to bury.

They drew the line in a completely different place than we were taught to draw it. We were taught the line ran between belief and unbelief, between obeying God and rebelling against him. The Gnostics drew it between gnosis and ignorance, between direct knowing and secondhand performance. And gnosis did not mean believing the right things about God. It meant encountering God. Knowing in the way you know a person you have actually met, not in the way you know a fact you were handed.

Sit with how different those two things are, because the whole series has been circling this and now I can say it straight. The false god only ever wanted obedience. He wanted you to follow the rules, affirm the doctrines, perform the devotion, and he never once required you to meet him, because there was nothing there to meet. Obedience to an external authority is exactly the relationship a demiurge can run. It costs him nothing. It keeps you facing outward, toward the rules, toward the watcher, away from the one place he cannot follow you.

The real God was never available through obedience. The real God is only available through encounter. And the door to that encounter is not above you in the sky where you were trained to look. It is the spark, the thing inside you that you forgot you were carrying.

Let me be precise about what I mean by the spark, because this is where I part ways with a certain kind of spiritual talk that I think is a dead end.

I am not telling you that you are God in totality. I am not telling you that you are the Pleroma in disguise and that waking up means realizing you were the whole thing all along. That is the oneness gospel with better production values, and I have spent years explaining why I think it fails. The spark is not the Source. The spark is your kinship with the Source. It is the part of you that came from the depths and still remembers the way back, the point of contact, the antenna that was always tuned to a station you stopped listening for. It is divine in origin and divine in family, and it is not the same thing as the One it longs for.

That distinction is everything. The whole purpose of the spark is relationship. It is the capacity for direct communion with a Spirit who is wholly other than you, a Presence you can actually meet and be met by, the way I was met in the valleys I wrote about in the first essay. When I said that God had been with me since childhood, present and real and good, I was not describing a doctrine I held. I was describing encounters I had. That was gnosis. I just did not have the word for it yet, and the religion I was in had no shelf to put it on, because the religion ran on obedience and the encounters did not.

I am aiming this next part at my own people, the deconstructed and the tired and the ones who think the spiritual question is behind them now.

Leaving is not arriving. Tearing down the false god is real work and I honor it, and it is not the same as meeting the real one. If you fire the external god and then never go looking for direct contact, never pursue the encounter, never once put yourself in the way of Presence and stay long enough to be found, then you have not finished deconstructing. You have only changed which cell you sleep in. You traded a god you perform for a world you cannot feel, and you called the trade liberation.

The spark does not wake up because you won an argument against your old church. It does not wake up because you read the right books or saw through the right manipulations. Seeing through the false is necessary, and it is only the clearing of the ground. The spark wakes up through encounter, and encounter has to be sought. It asks something of you. It asks you to act as though the line might be live, to go toward Presence in your actual body and your actual life and your actual attention, and to keep going toward it even when the materialist voice in your head, which is just the demiurge wearing a lab coat now, tells you there is no one there.

I have spent four essays helping you take a god down. This is the one where I start asking what you are going to do with the empty room.

Because you do have a spark. You felt it the whole time you were reading this, the same way you felt the seam in the first essay. It is the thing in you that has never once been satisfied by the flat answer, that keeps reaching past the dead-world story no matter how reasonable the dead-world story sounds. That reaching is not a malfunction. It is the oldest and truest part of you, the part that remembers a home it has never seen. And it is not asking you to escape your life to find what it reaches for. It is asking you to wake up inside your life and finally turn toward the One who has been on the other end of the line since before you had a name for him.

You fired the false god, and that was the hard and necessary half. Now go meet the real one.

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A lot of people I talk to have the same quiet feeling lately, and they have a hard time saying it out loud without sounding paranoid. The feeling is that something is off with the world at a level deeper than any single news story. That the floor has tilted. That there are powers moving behind the surface of things that do not have our good in mind, and that the official version of events is rarely the whole version.

You can probably name your own reasons. A pandemic that scrambled almost everyone’s trust in the institutions that were supposed to hold. A set of files about a powerful man and his friends that confirmed the ugliest suspicions people already had about how protection works at the top. A new kind of intelligence arriving faster than anyone voted for, built by a handful of people most of us will never meet. Whatever your particular list looks like, the mood underneath it is widespread, and it is old. It is the feeling that we are living inside something that was not built for us, run by hands we cannot see.

Here is what struck me as I sat with the Gnostic story over the last couple of weeks. That feeling is the exact feeling the Gnostics were mapping eighteen hundred years ago. A world that looks like creation but functions like a cage. A maker who is not the highest thing and does not have your freedom in mind. Rulers operating in the gap between you and the truth. We filed all of that under ancient heresy, and it turns out to be one of the most current descriptions of modern life I have read.

So I want to ask the real question, and it is not whether the myth is literally true, because I already told you I do not think there was a lion-headed god sulking in a cloud. The question is what the myth is for. What real thing does it put its finger on. And I think it works on two levels at once, one outside you and one inside you, and the inside one is the one that can actually set you free.

Start outside, carefully, because this is where it gets dangerous.

The Gnostic story gives language to a true perception. Power does often operate out of sight. Institutions that present themselves as servants of God or the public good do sometimes serve their own survival first. The surface of things is often not the whole of things. None of that is paranoid. It is just paying attention. People who have been lied to by a church, a family, or a government are not broken for noticing the pattern. They are awake to something real.

But the same story carries a trap inside it, and I have watched it close on people. Once you decide the whole world is a prison and every authority is an archon, you can end up somewhere worse than where you started. You lose the ability to tell the difference between seeing clearly and seeing enemies everywhere. Everything becomes evidence. Every kind face might be a mask. The frame that was supposed to wake you up quietly builds you a smaller cell, one made of suspicion, where no one can be trusted and nothing can land. The feeling that started as discernment hardens into something that looks a lot like despair. That is the shadow side of this whole way of seeing, and a story about freedom can imprison you as thoroughly as anything it was protesting.

So hold the outside reading loosely. It tells the truth about a feeling. It is a terrible place to build a permanent home.

The inside reading is where the real gold is, and it is the one that connects to everything I have been writing about.

Carl Jung spent a good part of his life on these texts, and he read the whole drama as a map of the inner world. In his reading, the demiurge is not a being out in the cosmos. The demiurge is a part of you. It is the piece of the mind that takes itself for the whole of you, the inner authority that issues commands and keeps score and never once suspects there is anything deeper than itself. For a lot of us, that inner authority was installed by religion. It is the voice that watches your thoughts and measures your worth and tells you to obey. It speaks in the first person, as if it were the real you, and it has no idea that it is only a part, a blind ruler convinced it is the whole kingdom.

And then there is the spark. In Jung’s reading the spark is the Self, the deeper center, the part of you that the inner ruler cannot see and cannot control. It is the quiet knowing underneath the noise that says, this is not all I am, and that voice giving the orders is not the deepest thing in here.

If you have followed this series, you already know where this lands. The two God problem I started with is this whole drama run on a single soul. The threatening god, the one who demanded and watched and withheld, was the demiurge installed inside me. And the God I knew since childhood, the one who was present and good and with me in the dark, was what the spark had been reaching for the whole time. I had a blind ruler in my head wearing God’s name, and a deeper knowing that never fully believed him. Waking up was not learning new information. It was realizing which voice was really me.

This is also why the Gnostic story is one of the most honest answers to the problem of evil that anyone has ever offered.

Most of the faith I was raised in handled suffering by insisting it was secretly good. The abuse was discipline. The loss was a plan. The cruelty was love you were too small to understand. And if you have ever sat with someone whose life had fallen apart and watched them try to thank God for the thing that broke them, you know how much violence that does to a person. The Gnostic move refuses it. It looks at the wrongness in the world and in your story and it says the wrongness is real, and it does not come from the deepest place, and you are not crazy for feeling that it should not be this way. Remember the woman from the first piece, the one whose vision showed Jesus turning his back and walking away. The thing that finally healed her was not being told that the turning away was secretly kindness. It was being allowed to say it was real. The Gnostics built a whole cosmos to protect that one permission.

So here is where I come down, and it is the same place this series keeps landing.

Keep the diagnosis, and throw out the cure.

The old Gnostics and the modern prison feeling both end up in the same posture, which is the longing to get out. Escape the body, escape the world, withdraw, trust nothing, wait for the exit. And I understand the pull of it. But that road ends in the cell I described earlier, the one made of suspicion and distance, and I have never once seen it lead to a life. The spark does not really want out of the flesh. It wants to wake up inside it. The waking is not a launch toward some pure realm above the world. It is a homecoming into your own body, your own street, the actual people in front of you, the real that is closer than the voice in your head has ever let you get.

Jung saw this too. He kept the entire Gnostic map and he changed the destination. The point was never to flee the ego and the body and the world. The point was to bring the blind ruler back into relationship with the deeper Self, to make the parts whole, to come down into your life rather than out of it.

So that is the truth I think the old heresy is speaking to us right now. The off-ness you feel is real. The false authority, out in the world and inside your own head, is real. And the part of you that can tell the difference is the truest thing about you. The only place the story lies is in the exit. The way home was never up and out. It was down and in, and it was here the whole time.

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