The Spirits' Book

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Fr. Andrew: I just wanted to make another… Because we’re going to be talking, I know, because we’re both nerds in different ways and on different levels for sure, but we’re going to be talking a lot about words and what they mean and how they’re used and how they’re used in lots of different ways. Someone might counter and say, “Doesn’t the word elohim, doesn’t that mean ‘gods’ in Hebrew? Doesn’t elohim just mean the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? Doesn’t that just mean Yahweh?” Is that the case? Is elohim only used in the Hebrew Bible for Yahweh? Fr. Stephen: Right, but atheists will make hay of that with us. They’ll say, “Hey, I’m just saying the same thing about your miracles that you say about everybody else’s. I’m just saying the same thing about your God that you say about everybody else’s.” Fr. Andrew: That is a good and a very… That’s a great question and I think really important, because, if you look at the baptismal service, we ask God in the course of that baptismal service to assign a guardian angel to that person. We don’t say that because we just want to say it; we believe that that happens. We don’t ask God for things that we don’t think are going to happen, especially in services like baptism. Angels are assigned to us to guard us, to help us.

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Fr. Andrew: And you can’t just flip a switch and decide: I’m not going to be a materialist any more! [Laughter] Today I will believe in spirits! Fr. Stephen: Some examples of this that might help with that in the New Testament, for example: St. Paul refers to the devil as the god of this present age. He’s not saying that he rivals the God of Israel in power or prestige or is a second god. He’s talking about the function he has.

It’s interesting, and it also comes in if you’ve ever gone to Great Compline, which we especially serve during—at least in our tradition—Great Lent. But it shows up, of course, at other times of the liturgical year. There is a hymn in there called “Lord of hosts”: “O Lord of hosts, be with us, for we have no other help in times of sorrow but thee.” Which in the Byzantine tradition is just a wonderful, big, throaty kind of manly hymn. But what’s interesting is that in Greek it’s: “ Kyrie [ton] dynamaeon, Lord of powers,” but it means the same thing. I mean, isn’t that just simply the Septuagint translation of “Lord Sabaoth,” right? So my interest is pastoral. It’s also I like to geek out about this kind of stuff. But I think one of the important disambiguations, to use your term here, Fr. Stephen, to make here at the beginning is that just to define one of the differences between the two of us is that you are an actual biblical scholar, right?—we’ll maybe make you list off the languages that you read at some point—and I’m not. I’m not. It’s not like “and now we have a panel of two experts in biblical scholarship, ready to answer your questions.” That’s not what this show is. If you’ve read Fr. Stephen’s blog, The Whole Counsel of God, you listen to his podcast, you know that he’s studied this stuff very closely and has as lot of in-depth knowledge. He actually has a doctorate. Is it biblical studies or New Testament? I’m trying to remember which. Kardec, Allan, The Spirits Book - Containing the Principles of the Spiritist Doctrine Concerning the Immortality of the Soul, the Nature of Spirits and their Relationships with Humankind, Moral Laws, the Present Life, the Future Life and the Destiny of Humanity – According to the Teachings Given by Highly Evolved Spirits Through Several Mediums Received and Coordinated. (Translated by Darrel W. Kimble with Marcia M. Saiz), Brasilia, 2006: International Spiritist Council. A living person is made of three entities: the spirit, the body and the spiritual body (the perispirit) that binds both. The perispirit is an original word of Spiritism.

The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende | Goodreads The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende | Goodreads

But here’s the thing. Modern Christians, I think, are materialists, and here’s why I would say that. It’s not because most Christians don’t believe that there’s an immaterial element of reality—that they don’t believe they have a soul, that they don’t believe that there’s angels, that they don’t believe that God is real—Christians will say… I mean, I’ve never met a Christian that doesn’t believe in an immaterial reality. Maybe they’re out there; I don’t know. It doesn’t look like Christianity to me, but I would say that modern Christians are materialists not on purpose but by habit, that on a day-to-day basis the way we mostly live our lives is as though the 3D world of the senses is all that there is. The example I often give is one time I ate a lot of pizza and some spicy hot wings. I’m getting to be middle-aged. In fact, Fr. Stephen and I are almost the same age; he is a little older by just a few months, if I remember correctly.

After this is a section on necromancy, involving magic circles and calling upon the aforementioned four kings, names of God, and different saints to constrain a called spirit. [16] The instructions on necromancy are followed by a means of finding hidden treasure that is similar to the method used by Edward Kelley, with spells to bind the spirit guarding the treasure. [17] Following this is yet another means of summoning King Leraje, [18] and then similar instructions to summon a spirit named Baron, and a spell named "an experiment of Rome," and spells to find lost items, steal items, see spirits (involving the invocation of King Arthur), and enchanting hazel rods. [19] I’m super interested in this show because I think that there’s so much about spiritual life that it’s easy for us, not just to miss, but to have kind of endless struggles with that we don’t necessarily have to have. We’re going to talk about this a lot as we go, and of course not just in this episode, but it’s going to be a perennial issue: the sense that we have that the 3D world that we experience is kind of like all we feel we can access most of the time, but as Christians we want to access something beyond this, and it’s very frustrating when you maybe reach out for God and the saints and you’re like: Where are you? What’s going on? Serving as a pastor for 11 years, this is a perennial issue, and I think any pastors that are out there listening to this, I’m sure you’ve had the same experience, but even just Christians, we all have this difficulty because we’re modern people living in a way of thinking and looking at the world that makes it difficult to access spiritual reality. One last note on this question—hopefully that’s thorough enough—one last note on this question, because I think it’s important. What we mean when we say that there is one true God, what it means to be a true God, because I think what we hear as modern American Christians, when you hear “true God” is: “Oh, he’s the one that exists, and the other ones are fake.” Chapter 1 (Earthly Joys and Sorrows) is about the meaning of the experiences we have on Earth, both good and bad. Fr. Stephen: However, evil angels can die. We just read from Psalm 82. We didn’t read the verse, but verses 6 and 7.

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Fr. Andrew: Yes! And we’re just sort of stumbling through this, too. I’m learning how to do this. So thank you for bearing with us. Fr. Stephen: That the other ones are made up. But remember what we were saying earlier in our discussion. The idea of being god is the idea of exercising authority and dominion and reign. So God is the one true God. He is the one who truly holds all authority and power and dominion over the entire creation. Anyone else who has any authority or power or dominion has received it from above, has received it from him, or they don’t have it. This question kind of refers to I guess any physical geography and the correlation it has to heavenly events and places. But what is it about Mt. Hermon that makes it a recurring physical place for events of such cosmic significance? Fr. Stephen: Let me have one little bit before we do that. I don’t want to leave people hanging with “the gods” there! [Laughter] Who is like you, O Yahweh, among the gods? Who is like you, majestic in holiness, awesome in glorious deeds, doing wonders?Fr. Andrew: Right. Or your elderly aunt comes to you and says, “Your grandmother talked to me last night.” Your dead grandmother. “She came to me.” You’re like: “Uhmm… Well… You know, that’s nice.” Right? We tend to function that way. We don’t give credence to it.

Book of spirits: The book of spirits - Free PDF e-book Book of spirits: The book of spirits - Free PDF e-book

Fr. Stephen: In terms of what we’re here to accomplish, if anyone knows anything about me, you know I’m a Bible guy and I do Bible stuff. I think what I really want to do is do a little part of the work of helping English-speaking American Orthodox Christians kind of appropriate more of the fullness of the Orthodox faith, particularly as it pertains to our spiritual sensibility, our sense of the spiritual world, and the way that can and should infuse our whole lives. Fr. Andrew: And, by the way, Ugaritic is one of the obscure languages that Fr. Stephen knows how to read. [Laughter] Fr. Andrew: Because, I mean, he’s the expert, but I do have a couple things I want to throw in here, if only so we can hear him correct me. [Laughter]The Spirits Book is divided into four parts or "books", each one split into several chapters. Chapters are not regularly subdivided into sections — though most have titles marking the beginning of particularly sought subjects. Book 3's chapters, for some reason, are not numbered. And one of those things is this teaching that St. John the Forerunner, John the Baptist, went to Hades to preach the coming of Christ. Now, you’re not going to see that in the Bible, but it is a belief that is actually in Orthodox tradition. I actually noticed this for the first time just a few years ago, and the funny thing is it’s actually kind of staring you in the face. It’s referenced in lots of places, especially in our liturgical tradition. So, for instance, a couple weeks ago, on the New Calendar we just celebrated the Beheading of John the Baptist, that feast, and I had noticed that in the apolytikion, which is kind of one of the main hymns for the feast, that it actually mentions that he goes to Hades to preach there. I’d sung it for years, but I’d never just taken notice of that particular phrase. It’s in the apolytikion, so I started looking at other texts, and you know what? It’s in the kontakion, too, the other main hymn for the day. Then I started looking at more and more, especially throughout the Menaion, which is the main set of festal texts for the feast—and it’s everywhere. It’s mentioned over and over that he goes to the underworld to preach to those in Hades. Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s a good question! I know you asked that to Fr. Stephen, but could I just begin to take a shot at this, if you don’t mind? So how do you interact more with your angel? Well, number one, a lot of prayer books, for instance, will have a prayer in there called “The Prayer to Your Guardian Angel.” If you don’t have it in your prayer book, then you could probably find an Orthodox prayer to the angel online somewhere; I’m sure that you can find something. That’s something that I would incorporate into your prayer every day. That’s something that actually I don’t know why I started doing this—not that long ago, I’m kind of ashamed to admit, within just the past couple of years—as I’m going to sleep, first of course we pray to our Lord Jesus Christ to preserve us and to save us, because we could die in our sleep, but also the next thing that I do then is I specifically say, “O guardian of my soul and body, protect me from all assaults of the evil one this night.” And then I also add, because I’m a husband and a father, “Protect my wife and my children,” and I name them in that prayer as I’m going to sleep.