Demon-Worship At The Flea Market

Take a look at this “community altar,” where everybody in this town is invited to pay their respects to a demon:

A Texas reader sent me that last night. He says this Santa Muerte altar is at the center of the Kyle Flea Market, on the interstate highway between Austin and San Antonio. He writes:

Had lunch with two Mexican-American colleagues today and they’re telling me it is absolutely everywhere now. Growing fast.

One of them says of the Kyle Flea Market altar that it has been significantly expanded: “When I went by it was mostly black and the black, hooded Santa Muerte statue was very large, at least 8-9ft and right in the middle.” Plus two other brujeriá (witchcraft) stands adjoining it.

Here’s an NBC News piece from ten years ago, reporting on the US presence of the Santa Muerte (Saint Death) cult, which began as a demonic parody of the Virgin Mary adopted by Mexican drug cartels, but which burst out of the criminal underworld. Excerpts:

“Undoubtedly, it’s the fastest growing religious movement in the entire Americas – not only Mexico and the U.S.,” according to Andrew Chesnut, Bishop Sullivan Chair of Catholic Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, who authored the first book in English about the saint, “Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint.”

There is no hard data on the amount of devotees, but Chesnut estimates there are 10 to 12 million worshipers between the U.S., Mexico, and Central America.

Again, this was a decade ago. More:

According to Chesnut, one of the reasons for Santa Muerte’s widespread appeal is that she accepts everyone and doesn’t discriminate. For instance, she may have a connection to LGBT people, sex workers, and others who are often shunned from the Catholic Church.

“On one level she’s very Mexican. But on another level, since she’s death herself, she knows no borders or frontiers,” according to Chesnut.

Steven Bragg, a 38 year-old federal government employee, created a public shrine outside his home in New Orleans, which attracts many worshipers, including Latinos.

“I wanted to have something outside for her and spread her devotion,” said Bragg.

Those who gather at Bragg’s New Orleans Chapel of the Santisima Muerte, are mostly white, middle-class, and college educated. He says during service they recite the Our Father Prayer and three Hail Marys.

Bragg, who is originally from Mississippi, was raised Pentecostal but became disenchanted with the church when he was around 17 years old. As a gay young man, Bragg was turned off by the church’s viewpoint on homosexuality and says he had philosophical questions which were not answered by the Catholic church.

This year, a prominent Mexican priest who is also an exorcist issued a stern warning:

Father Andrés Esteban López Ruiz, a member of the College of Exorcists of the Primatial Archdiocese of Mexico, recently warned about the risks of the cult of “Santa Muerte” or “St. Death,” pointing out that those who practice it “implicitly or explicitly worship Satan, risking submitting themselves to him and experiencing his extraordinary action.”

In an article published on the website of the International Association of Exorcists, the priest noted that the “proliferation of this cult has led to a significant increase in the extraordinary action of the devil,” which can include demonic possession.

López said that Mexican exorcists have confirmed “numerous cases of oppression, obsession, and demonic possession linked to the practice and growing spread of the cult of ‘Santa Muerte.’”

The exorcist went on to describe the Santa Muerte cult as a “Mexican version of satanic worship,” and warned people that involving yourself in it opens you up to demonic possession.

But hey, in America, you can buy Santa Muerte gear at Walmart:

Last night in Budapest I had dinner with an English friend and reader of this newsletter. He is on his way into the Catholic Church. I had shared with him an early copy of Living In Wonder, which he said he loved. We talked about the emerging religious landscape, and I told him that one of the most important things anybody told me in researching this book was the 27-year-old Anglican seminarian’s words about how the occult is booming among his generation — and how my generation and older are completely clueless. That priest-in-training told me he expects to be dealing with this phenomenon head-on for the rest of his life as a priest.

My dining companion and I agreed that all this religious churn and change is happening outside the notice of most normal people, especially in the churches. Santa Muerte is just one part of it. These things are not simply quaint, exotic foreign religious customs that enrich our lives with diversity. No, this is devil worship and trafficking in demons. It is drawing into our common life powerful evil entities who seek our destruction.

Many, and probably most, normie Christians don’t want to know about any of this stuff. They think, somehow, that their ignorance will protect them. This is quite wrong. You may not be interested in the demonic, but the demonic is very interested in you. And you can’t have only happy, light-filled enchantment; the wicked, dark side is also present. When I speak next week at the Touchstone conference about Christian re-enchantment as a “survival strategy” for Christians in the negative world, part of my talk will be about how the world is “re-enchanting” whether we like it or not — and Christians not only have to become aware of what is happening, but also how to respond to it spiritually.

What do you do if you live in or around Kyle, Texas, and you know that there is a large altar to a demon, to the worship of death, in the middle of a main shopping market in your town? How do you respond to that? How do you pray? What do you tell your kids? It is not enough just to mind your own business. The kinds of evil spiritual forces that will be drawn to your town via that kind of thing will affect you and your family, one way or the other.

You might think I’m bonkers for talking about this, but … we have to talk about this. Spend enough time in conversation with exorcists, as I have, and you will have no doubts about the realities of this world. An exorcist in Rome told me that Europe and North America have been protected for a long time, even amid our de-Christianization, because of the longtime presence of Christian belief and worship among us. But, he said, supernature abhors a vacuum, and where the true God is not honored and worshiped, the evil one will move in to reclaim territory. We are seeing that accelerate now. Imagine: a small city in Texas has a popular altar consecrated to a demon, in the middle of a market. This would have once been unthinkable. No longer.

By the way, yesterday I heard from a Catholic journalist friend who is reading the UFO/tech chapter of Living In Wonder, and who said it’s interesting to contemplate its material in light of a recent conversation he had with a witch he knows in his local area. She told him, “I know that God exists, but I want nothing to do with Him; I give my soul entirely to the UFOs.”

“What does the think the UFOs are?” I texted back.

“The old gods,” he said.

See, that is very interesting to me, and I’ll tell you why. First, here is how the entire UFO aspect of the story of re-enchantment got on my radar. From Living In Wonder:

My smartphone dinged one morning with a message from a journalist friend in Rome.

“I’m telling you, Rod, the UFO thing is bigger than you think and also not what you think,” his WhatsApp text said.

What? He went on to say that he knew I didn’t take UFOs seriously but that I needed to start, because there were spiritually significant things going on in that world. With skepticism, I started reading serious books that my friend suggested about the phenomenon. My old-fashioned view of UFOs, stuck somewhere between the cheesy 1970s megaselling book Chariots of the Gods and the first season of The X-Files, quickly dissolved. I had not known how seriously UFOs are taken by many powerful people in government (especially the military and the intelligence agencies) and the tech world. Nor had I known how much evidence exists for the reality of UFOs.

What are they? I don’t know. Nobody seems to. Yet the most subversive thing I discovered about UFOs was that the most intelligent and highly placed people who investigated the phenomenon did not believe that they are aliens from other planets. Rather, most appear to think that they are discarnate higher intelligences from other dimensions of reality. Now, whatever they are or aren’t, two things are true. The first is that there is something going on, and the second is that whatever that something is, it is evidence of the fact that this world, for lighter or darker, is more than meets the eye.

Now, here is a passage from the occult chapter of Living In Wonder, in which I tell the story of an ex-occultist turned Christian. I give him the pseudonym “Jonah”:

At the university where he began his doctoral program, Jonah fell in with an occultist community and began to participate in rituals, often incorporating psychedelics. Eventually he began to have visions and communicate with demons. On a number of occasions they entered his body—sometimes against his will.

For a couple of years, Jonah thought he was being initiated into special knowledge, into gnosis, with a group of elect who had been chosen by the gods as their acolytes to enlighten humanity. Those early experiences of visions were genuinely beautiful and truly meaningful. If they had not been, Jonah would not have been seduced into slavery.

“Behind this idea of morally neutral, psychedelic enchantment was the most satanic evil possible,” he now says. “I have no excuse for it, but I have to say that I had been primed by these ideologies over the years to explain away all this to my family and friends as it’s just nature, it’s beauty, it’s tolerance, it’s all these things—and then I get to the point where I’m literally seeing red dragons, I am feeling demonic loathing for humanity, and I am being possessed.

“I went along with it, because I thought I had no other choice at that point. I had been seeing hell itself all along, but I’d convinced myself, through my sophisticated pagan ideology, that it was something else. But finally I couldn’t deny it.”

These weren’t ancient gods at all, he finally understood, but demons. He began to suspect that there was something wrong with all of this and at last confronted the numerous contradictions in his occult worldview. Once Jonah grasped that he was being manipulated by the entities with whom he was communicating, and that these were beings that wanted to destroy humanity, he wanted out.

I go on to talk about how the late Seraphim Rose, an Orthodox monk who died in the 1980s, once wrote a book claiming that the UFO phenomenon was demonic, and was manifesting now to prepare the world to accept a false religion. I first encountered that claim in Rose’s book right after I became Orthodox in 2006. I had no interest in anything to do with UFOs, and didn’t take it seriously.

Well, here’s more from Living In Wonder:

I reread Rose’s book after Jonah, the ex-occultist turned Orthodox Christian who appeared in an earlier chapter, told me how shocked he was, after his conversion, to discover that the things Seraphim Rose foresaw were very close to what the demonic “gods” with whom he communed as an occultist told him was their plan to enslave and destroy humanity.

Along those lines, it stunned me to read the persuasive case that bestselling Christian writer and pastor Jonathan Cahn makes that ancient Sumerian gods—Baal, Ishtar, and Moloch—have returned and are asserting their dark power over the post-Christian world. As a Messianic Jewish cleric and a megachurch pastor, Cahn’s world is very different from the Christian headspace inhabited by Orthodox Christians such as Jonah and me. But when I put Cahn’s argument to him, Jonah didn’t hesitate to affirm it as “absolutely correct.”

I recommend to you Cahn’s book The Return Of The Gods, which develops his argument. I went into it skeptical; I came out convinced that Cahn is onto something. This theme that “aliens” are merely the outer cloak of “gods” (or demons, if you prefer) keeps recurring in my research. Jacques Vallée, the grand old man of UFOlogy, wrote as far back as 1969 of his belief that every culture and civilization in history has had these preternatural and supernatural beings within them, but they manifest in culturally relative ways. His theory is that for a scientific-technological age like ours, it would make sense for these entities, if they wanted to manipulate us, to manifest as creatures from other planets. Vallée, who is not a Christian or conventionally religious, has pointed out that popular culture has for decades now conditioned the masses to expect enlightenment, and even deliverance, from space creatures.

Jonah told me that the “ancient gods” told him their plan was to lead humanity to merge itself with machines, and through that, they (the entities) planned to enslave and destroy humanity. Sounds crazy, right? Except here’s the thing: this line keeps coming up from people who claim to be in touch with these entities. A Christian friend in publishing told me that a man who used to be close to him in their Christian college went on to do DMT, the ultra-powerful psychedelic, and to have a “de-conversion experience” — meaning, he renounced his Christian faith. That ex-Christian now claims to be in touch with “ancient gods” who are going to merge man with machine, and who are going to come back to defeat the evil God of the Bible.

Look, if you’ve followed my career for any amount of time, you know that these people and these stories find their way to me. It’s why my friend Ross Douthat once asked me when I was finally going to write my “woo book.” So, maybe I just have had uncanny luck, if luck is the word, in meeting and hearing from people from all over who tell close variations of the same story: that the Ancient Gods are going to return manifesting as aliens, and are going to assault the God of the Bible — Baal, Moloch, and Ishtar strike back — and ultimately enslave humanity.

Maybe I’m just a weirdo magnet. Or maybe something dark and extremely significant is underway right beneath our noses, and playing out in ways we have not anticipated, if we even thought about it at all. I hope Living In Wonder is widely read in the Christian community, and we can talk about these things.

Might I suggest that you consider pre-ordering gift copies for your friends and church community? I expect that the media will treat this book, which comes out on October 22, like they did Live Not By Lies: totally ignoring it. Yet LNBL became very big through word of mouth, and has sold more than twice the number of copies that The Benedict Option did, even though the Ben Op book was far more discussed in the media. If Living In Wonder is going to be a hit, it’s almost certainly going to be because one reader said to another, you’ve got to read this thing, it’ll blow your mind.

Once again: I didn’t write this book because Christian re-enchantment is a neat story. Most of the book is about how to live a richer and more fully Christian life by returning to older Christian ways of thinking and living in the world as it really is, not as we moderns think it is. But you can’t pick and choose enchantment. If you are going to tear down the barriers preventing you from accessing a more complete and accurate reality, you have to recognize that the demonic realm is part of reality too. What’s more, that dark enchantment is spreading rapidly in our de-Christianizing world. If you are going to live in reality, not simply within a comforting, curated version of it, you, Christian, are going to have to get the whole picture, and deal with it — even if your clergy prefer to pretend everything is fine, and will return to “normal” if we just sit quite still and wait it out. If you aren’t prepared for what’s coming, you’re never going to know what hit you.