Blurry Creatures - EP: 14 Vampires & Werewolves with Dr. Judd Burton

Episode Date: October 30, 2020

We welcome back Dr. Judd Burton for a dive into the history of Vampires and Werewolves. What is the origin of these creatures? Is there any reason to think these creatures existed or perhaps still do? Is the modern cinematic vampire anything like the ones people described in ancient days?  Guest: www.burtonbeyond.com [e-mail] blurrycreatures.com Socials instagram.com/blurrycreatures facebook.com/blurrycreatures twitter.com/blurrycreatures Music Kyle Monroe: tinytaperoom.com Aaron Green: https://www.instagram.com/aaronkgreen/ Outro Song: TimeCop1983: timecop1983.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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What do you say, Luke? Spooky. Spooky. You're not dressed up. That's a little disappointing. Oh, man, but I have some orange on my shirt. You have the right colors, either for being a Cleveland Browns fan or for, you know, the fall fist.

Right, right. Right away, I guess we could hop right into this. Is there evidence that these stories of vampire? and werewolves is based in some truth. When we're looking back in the history, like, where does this come from? And there's stories of hundreds of people getting killed by these. Some people just think it's all Hollywood.

And none of this stuff ever happened. Can you give us some historical context to these creatures? And we'll just hop right in. Looking at pop culture, we get a constant barrage of movies about vampires, werewolves, mummies and all kinds of, you know, classic monsters. But oftentimes, in order to understand them better, you have to kind of strip away the literary and cinematic elements.

Because without Phil, all of these kinds of creatures have an anthropological, folkloric, mythological context that they begin in. So their origins lie along those lines. But because they lie along those lines, if they're recorded in culture, in tradition, then that lends the possibility that they're real, that these were things that were experienced not just once, but numerous times, and recorded in oral tradition first in the mythologies of prehistoric and early antique peoples and then written down in a literary fashion once writing became invoked. Take the vampire, for instance. We usually think of vampires

within the context of whatever pop culture we live in and for for this generation it's it's the twilight vampires or it's the vampire diary vampires or the true blood true blood vampires or to be Brad Pitt right

interview with the vampire yeah if you really like a good in a real attractive vampire that might be your thing yeah hey that's what we can call this episode interview with a vampire expert there you go that's a prom mean material or authority.

Yeah, it is. Luke is Dr. Meem, by the way. Dr. Meem. You are. This is ridiculous. No, but Judd, I think this isn't too far away from what we were talking about with giants. We're talking about mythology and these things lived in the world tradition.

It's hard to say. The vampire and the werewolf and these things that go bump in the night, they haven't ever lost their steam per se, at least in our traditions, you know, from whether it be ancient times to now. And so how did that start? And why does it still relevant today? And did these things exist at one point? Or did this still exist?

The reason I studied neo-pagans, I could have gone one of two routes. I could have gone the anthropological route, which I did, or I could have done a master's in classics, which I essentially already had the language training for anyway because I'd done Greek and Latin, a little bit of Latin, but mainly Greek at that point.

I wanted to study mythology and I couldn't do it in a laboratory setting, but the closest I could do were you had actual people that were thinking mythologically and acting upon it was to study peoples that were embracing mythological traditions and trying to revitalize would be the term used in anthropological literature. And so I chose to do the best that I could. and short of taking a time machine, this was the closest thing that I could get in actually studying mythology in a classical and ancient mythology, specifically, since most of those traditions are based on those in a real-time setting. As to the second point, certainly the idea of these creatures has been around with us for a long time, but the fact or rather the notion that they existed in real time and space, I think is events not only by the breadth of, of, of, folkloric and historical accounts, but also by the apocryphal literature that's associated with the Bible. So they talk about those things. Yeah. And I think to understand these creatures, whether it's vampires or werewolves or ghouls or gulls or revenants or basically any kind of folkloric monster, most people agree that these things aren't kind. They're not benevolent. They don't have

your best interest at heart. And I think a lot of them can be traced back to the pre-flood world, as described in the book of Enoch. It's been established linguistically that the demons of the biblical world, the Old Testament and New Testament world, were the disembodied spirits of the giants, the Nephilim that were destroyed in the flood. Well, if you look at the character traits, they were violent, they hated humanity, they consumed all the resources of humanity when they ran out, they started actually killing people and drinking their blood. They warred against each other, killed each other and drank each other's blood. And so, you know, as far as the vampire is concerned, the origins of the vampire can be traced back to the demons who exhibited these kinds

of behaviors to begin with. The fact of the matter that they lost their physicality didn't mean in any stretch of the imagination. They stopped being the things that they were before the flood. They were still as violent and voracious and evil and wicked as they were before the flood. It's just now they had with the increasing diversity of cultures and ethnicities in the world after the flood, you had different cultural niches that could be exploited by these demons. And so they began to fashion themselves into vampires. That's why we see variations of the vampire and other were creatures all across the globe. You know, you can spin the globe and stop it, and you're going to find a culture that has a creature like a vampire,

were a wolf, fill in the blank. What do you think about blood specifically? What is the magic of the blood? Because it goes all the way to Christ's blood, to these giants drinking blood. What is the obsession with blood there? Well, the sacriality of blood is well attested in world religions. In fact, you don't even have to go any farther than the Old Testament to find out, that a blood was sacred.

You know, there's the passage in Leviticus. It says the blood is in the life, you know, prohibitions against drinking blood in the Old Testament. There's a reason for that because apparently there is not only, it's not only life sustaining physically, but there's a supernatural component to blood. And that's why blood became so important in blood-ledding rituals and human sacrifice because of the innately understood sacriality of blood is that, Yeah, if this red liquid drains completely out of your body, you're going to die.

And because of the religious consciousness that had developed, or you could argue, was actually hardwired into humans, this understanding of the supernatural quality of blood was there as well. And in the case of the vampire, you can really think of the vampire as an awful parody of what Christ offers. You know, the vampire takes blood. Christ gave blood. The motivations in character makeup are completely anathema to what you see in the person of Jesus Christ. It's like an antithesis. It is very much an antithesis.

And I've heard the same thing goes for the werewolf, like where you have Jesus is considered the lamb, and then you have the wolf going after the lamb, right? So you have death to life, life to death, drinking the blood, shedding the blood. It's just like the opposite, right? And it makes me think about all the symbolism of sheep, goats in the Bible. I'm sure ancient people probably, or even Native Americans, or some of these types of people thought wolves might be evil in essence. Just the wolf is an evil animal? How far do you take this thinking?

Well, in terms of the werewolf and where creatures in general, in our argument for their origins in the pre-led world can be made as well. because in our past conversations on this show, we've talked about the manipulation of animal and human genomes. And you have all these chimera that are created in the pre-flood worlds. And certainly, you know, a werewolf would fall under that category. It is a chimera. Your other question intrigues me about the, how people thought about wolves, particularly pastoralist, you know, people who kept herds of animals. It reminds me of the lupacal that the, the Romans, so.

celebrated. Lupercal was celebrated on February the 15th. The worship of Pan, essentially, Pan was the god of the Lupercal. But one of the purposes behind the number of rather bizarre rights was to not just keep flocks safe from wolves, but to keep them safe from werewolves. Really? Yeah. The Romans believed in these things too, and it was an integral, there's several books on Roman history. Cornell is one. Forsyth is another who talks about these warwolf creatures. I think T.P. Wiseman, who wrote an excellent article about the Luprocalia,

I think he also briefly references that. But it's well attested. And of course, the wolf as a sort of totemic element in Roman culture, had been there since the beginning because, you know, one of the most iconic images in Roman culture was the she-wolf, the Capitoline wolf, nursing, Romulus, and Remus, the mythological founders of Rome. It's an icon that's found throughout the Roman world, and, you know, there were, there were legions in the Roman army used the wolf as an emblem. But specifically, the werewolf, though, was coming in and attacking, is it running on two legs, or is that kind of werewolf? Presumably, you know, they they wouldn't have thought of them as having human characteristics if they've...

Well, I mean, that's the modern accounts of the dog man. Yeah. Yeah, that they're capable of both quadrupedalism and bipedalism. So, yeah, but I mean, that was a revelation to me because by the time I learned that about the loopercalia, which I had studied before then, but I had never heard before I took this seminar on Roman history. Yeah. or Roman religion, rather, that that that was even a component that the pastoralist in the Roman world feared these werewolf creatures taking their flocks.

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Up front payment of $45 for a three-month, five-gigabyte plan required equivalent to $15 a month. New customer offer for first three months only, then full-price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See MintMobile for details. And there's a lot of reports of like, wasn't Montague Summers a priest? And he wrote a book on vampires? Yes, yeah, I actually wrote a book on Warwolves, too. Montague Summers was an amazing intellect.

He was an eccentric clergyman. Most of the books he wrote about were on occult topics. He wrote a couple of books on vampires. The vampire is kith and kin for anybody who's interested in this. If you're seriously interested in examining evidences and the corpus of information that's out there, one of the best books that you can read even to this day because it stood the test of time is the vampire, his kith and kin. The sequel to that, the vampire in Europe, is also an excellent work, both by Montague Summers.

But this guy could not only access and make sense of the more recent, and the folkloric elements, but he had the language training to examine the ancient stuff. You know, the Hebrew, the Mesopotamian, the Greek, the Roman, the bibliography, the citations in his works take up a good chunk. I mean, you know, probably a good sixth of the book is the account of where all this source material was that he was accessing from. It's just for the bibliographical information alone, these books are worth the investment. And he's, I see, like, surmising accounts of people having with these creatures, like actual accounts, or is it just the history of them? It sounds like he's like the Jeff Melodrome of Sasquatch for vampires and werewolves.

He really kind of is, you know, he didn't articulate it as such, but he really pioneered the field of what you could call vampirology. There have been other people who have sort of taken up the mantle. Bishop Sean Manchester is another fellow. He's also a priest in the autosophallic Catholic Church. And also a well-read and interesting fellow. You know, Summers, he struck the emblem, the coin, if you will, for the field of vamprology and really set the pace for it. It was actually by reading his work because of his allusions to the apocryphal material

and tying the vampire to the demonic world that I begin to consider, you know, what about these other creatures, you know, like werewolves and revenants and the same thing has to apply to them. And the reason I bring up him is because I think sometimes when you're talking about this space, you need someone who bring credibility to the subject, right? Yeah. And a lot of times if you're just, you know, you're like a girl who writes teenage vampire novels. Right. This isn't what we're talking about here. We're talking about a really well-respected priest who's really educated talking about these creatures. And I think a lot of people just think, oh, this is Twilight.

We're talking about some teen romance movie. Yeah. And I've had some rather heated discussions with Christians in particular who are adamant about, you know, I like Twilight, but vampires don't exist. There's no way that vampires could exist. The Bible doesn't talk about vampires. and I'm like, really? What Bible are you? I mean, some of the vampires of the ancient world are referenced by name in the Bible, such like Lilith is mentioned by name in Isaiah chapter 34. Some of these other bloodthirsty entities are also referenced not only in Old Testament, but also in the apocryphal literature that's associated with the Hebrew Bible. Are there any stories you can recount of these creatures, like true stories? Well, there's some interesting, I did a, one of the programs I have on my YouTube channel. It's called Sunday School X. And it's sort of like Sunday School meets the X files. And I deal with these kind of peripheral questions. And I did one on,

actually did a couple of videos on vampires. And I look at the precedent for them in the ancient world. So these are people that are actually writing down mythological and folkloric accounts of vampires. There was the Lamashtu in Mesopotamia. Like so many of these words that we have in Mesopotamian languages, we sort of have to backtrack them from their Acadian to the, to the Samarians were actually, they came up with this word. It was given, you know, the Acadians borrowed it, and then later Mesopotamian civilizations barred it. But they all knew what this La Mosh two thing was, is blood drinking demon. And there were other blood drinking demons from the Mesopotamian world. I mentioned Lilith a moment ago. He showed.

up in Mesopotamian literature as Lilit or Lalitu. She's described as a blood-drinking demon. In the Jewish tradition, she became the queen of demons. And her sustenance was not just any blood, but it was the blood of infants that were sleeping in their cribs. There's a lot of activity where people talk about this stuff like going on Epstein's Island doing this stuff, right? Yeah. So it's still going on today, basically. Yeah, any sort of blood ritual, by definition, is vampiric. I mean, there are people that are literally consuming blood, claiming probably legitimately that it does, you know, that it empowers them.

We already know that athletes that blood dope, you know, they get this oxygen-rich blood and get transfusions of it. They improve their oxygen capacity, their ability to perform at high levels. Lance Armstrong. Yeah. Exactly. That's exactly why he did. So he could, you know, when he got to the higher elevations, you know, he'd be able to handle, and he flew by, you know, all these other people because he was blood doping.

So there's not the religious supernatural component that people might brush aside as woo-woo, but there's a scientific precedent, you know, for this that it actually does empower. Yeah, well, they take the blood of young mice and put in old mice and then the young mice get young again, you know, they have, they start aging in reverse. It's been completely secularized, but the cult of Molek still exists in this country. I mean, we have butchered so many innocent individuals under the auspices of abortion. That's the largest blood right that's ever existed in the history of humanity. And it's just a continuation of what the ancient Canaanites were doing by offering their infants to Molek or what the Maya were doing. by throwing their children into the sonotes that they thought were openings into the underworld. Vampirism in all of its forms, whether it's the emulation of vampirism by occultist or Luciferans or whatever,

or the actual presence of a vampiric demon, vampirism is still very much alive in this world. It's just that we're culturally conditioned to discount them almost immediately because they're so prolific in our literature and our film and TV and whatnot. So they're not human, they take on human form? Because like, you know, we see dog, there's dogmen sightings all the time. Sasquatch sightings, we see these sightings,

they're reported. Is there vampire sightings? Or like, is there some sort of physical character traits that they have that we can say that we had modern sightings of these things or anything like that? Well, that's not to say that vampires couldn't appear as humans. Remember, if these demons retain any of the knowledge of the watchers, they're able to manipulate matter to varying degrees. The possibilities at least exist there, and that might go a long way towards explaining why vampires crop up returning as family members.

You know, people recognize them. That's certainly prevalent in a lot of the accounts in central and eastern Europe. You know, in sub-Saharan Africa, there were people that were doing kit. were killing people they thought were vampires. And yes, exactly. You know, and I have a story about that. When that story came out, I did an analysis of it, went back and looked at it this year, as a matter of fact, and I retweeted the story because the story I found was a really good

anthropological analysis of what was going on. There were people in several sub-Saharan African countries who were killing not only people that they thought were vampires, but that they also thought were witches. These beliefs are still very prevalent in many countries, even countries that have industrialized, those beliefs are still very prevalent. But Twitter took my retweet of that story down. Really? Yeah. I suspect because whatever algorithm was it at work, they thought it was a disparagement of African people, given our political climate right now.

What specific story was it, the one in Malawi? Yes. Yeah. That's the one I was looking at, 2017. these mobs of people beat up, killed people that they thought were vampires and responsible for these attacks

that were going on. Yeah. And this is modern day. This isn't, which is crazy, but also when you think about the level to which spirituality and witchcraft still exist in these countries as tenants and central beliefs, belief systems, like it isn't, like it is in

Haiti as well, you start to realize that there's a, man, there's a lot of crazy stuff that, you know, can be behind some of these what we call portals or some of these places where these things are invited in. I mean, I think it's wild.

So on the vampire thing as well, like, obviously 1897, Dracula comes out. It's loosely based on Vladian Paler. Bram Strucker basically stole a bunch of that stuff from the story of Vladimir Impaler. But historically, this myth and these stories

have continued with silver bullets and these things are pale. They can't look in mirrors. They have red eyes. And it seems like when we were talking about giants and on previous episodes and finding these stories, like even the flood narrative and the flood epic were a lot the same in different places. These are a lot of the same stories from different people groups that have the same attributes. And we were talking about myth and the way that that works and leading credence to the truth

behind the myth and the real story before literacy. Do these things, I mean, you think these things still pop up and roam around in, you know, in 2020. Yeah, certainly I do. You know, the component of wanting to dwell in flesh again of these disembodied spirits, you know, explains why people are demonized or possessed or whatever appellation you want to attach to it. And clearly, I think we've all been around people who just sort of like, it's just draining

to be around them. You just feel like you're, you know, they may not be taking blood, but they're, they're sucking the life out of you, you know. So there's that. level, but there's also the sort of, you know, these luciferians that are clearly demonized. They have an insatiable bloodlust. The stuff that's come out with like Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

You know, a lot of the human trafficking that goes on is not just not just for sex, but it's also for killing these children in these bloodletting rituals. And people who were groomed or raised in satanic, you know, Luciferian backgrounds and have gotten out of it have all attested to the fact that this is the case. In fact, a good colleague, a good buddy of mine, Dr. Greg Reed, was raised in California under these conditions. And by the grace of God, he was able to break out of it. You know, he'll tell you right off the bat, this stuff goes on behind closed doors. And so, yeah, vamprism is still prevalent. It's just that we have to, we have to strip the cinematic and the literary vampire with his cape and cloak.

and Widows Peak Herodoo. We've got to take all that stuff away from it. But there are other things. You know, you reference witchcraft. I lived in South Texas for 10 years. And culturally, South Texas is basically northern Mexico. There's still a lot of Brueharia and Curranderismo. There are still a lot of these witchcraft traditions that exist in that part of the world.

And I had students. Some of my best students come and tell me stories. from the old country, basically. One of them whose uncle was a lawyer. He related a number of stories about one of the common themes in witchcraft in the American Southwest is that the witches were shapeshifters. And amongst other things, they could travel as fireballs through the sky. And he related a story of his uncle being involved in a dispatchment of witches.

There was an evening where they saw these fireballs flying over their their property. And they did it night after not until the people instituted an hapatropaeic, you know, a repellent against these witches. And what they did is they laid crosses down on the ground and put nails where the hands and feet would be. And in the morning, they found these, these old women nailed to these crosses. Nailed to these crosses. Nailed to these crosses. A Lego set is a gift that always clicks. And clicks? And clicks. For kids who love to save the day, choose a Lego set.

A gift that always clicks. Whoa, like rat traps? Yeah. That's wild. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Yeah, these are supernatural rat traps, basically. Wow. That's crazy.

This caliber of story I heard with some frequency. You know, I've heard many stories about people going out and their livestock being dead and completely drained of blood. They're like dead on the ground. No blood in them. Have you heard these stories? Oh, yeah, yeah. Something came at night, killed them, drank all their blood left. Yeah.

That's modern day. That's the closest thing I've heard to like a Sasquash signing that you could like some empirical evidence or whatever to say. Something, some vampire like creature. Supercabra, right? So they believe that that's part of what happened. Yeah. I want to get back to the to the werewolf though because I know Nate has, you've had your own personal experience. And, you know, this has lots of different names.

We talk about the Beast of Bray Road is real famous. that it was reported in 1936 and then in the 90s outside of Elkhorn, Wisconsin. Supposedly a werewolf. But Nate, you've got a story. And we know we talked about this off before we started recording. You've had your own encounter. And I guess it wasn't a hairy uncle. It was a...

I told Luke a little bit about this, Jed. But when I was a kid, I was about seven years old. I lived in Northern California right near American River that went all the way up to the mountains and the foothills. We lived about a mile and a half from that river. That's the only thing that I can think of to give you some context of how this could have happened. But I used to stay up late and watch like Nick at Night reruns.

You rebel. You rebel you. And I was like six or seven so I watched like Andy Griffith and all that stuff. And it was just, I never got tired. But they would open the windows and doors at night in Northern California because it cools off, right?

It's not like the South where it's just hot all the time. So one night, getting up from the couch and I'm walking, it's like a long, kind of narrow part of the house. I'm walking from the family room through the dining room and there's a den that goes out to a screen door. I'm walking by and something was just like, I just felt this don't look left. And I, you know, I did, obviously. I look out the window and in the window is the face of a werewolf looking at me. And I was the youngest of four children. So it wasn't like I was the kid who was the oldest and can make up stories and get my youngest siblings to believe. My sister was

eight years older than me. I stop and I look at this thing and I, and I, and I swear it had, it was like grinning at me and it looked like pure evil. And I screamed and I ran into my parents' room and said, I saw a werewolf. I saw it. And right away, I'm so, I'm still young enough to think I must have made this up. And it wasn't until years later remodeling my first house when I started listening to these podcasts about people seeing this creature over and over again when I stopped. I was like, oh my, I didn't make that up. So here's how I know I think it happened. Because from the time I was about six or seven until I was about 12, I would run from the couch to the kitchen and I wouldn't look out the door. I was traumatized. I had PTSD with it. It's hard because I was just young

enough to tell myself it didn't happen. Like I made it up. But I also was like, who was I trying to convince? Like, no one would believe me, right? Right. I remember. I remember that sinister. Look like some pure, out of pure hell. Wow. Yeah, I mean, you don't have to convince me. You know, I mean, the precedent, you know, is already there in world folklore and the historical record. These things prey on fear, too. My brother had an experience, not dissoned. Similar to that, when he was very little, he was three, you know, he was, he was in his bed and one night, he felt something kicking underneath his bed like it, something was under there pushing the mattress up. He looked down. And of course, he's a little kid. So the way he described it was it looked like an evil Kermit the frog. It had red eyes. It had the shit, you know, this kind of reptilian, amphibian shape to it. three-year-old is he's sitting there saying you know kermit why are you doing this why are you trying to scare me and he he was traumatized by it for a while so yeah that because these things are

demonic in their root they they live off of fear they feed on fear because a long long way towards explaining why this thing was grinning at you like it was like you were its next meal well yeah i mean it it it um this is right around when stephen king's silver bullet movie came out I remember that movie. It had Everett McGill and Corey Haim, I think was in it. Yes, yes. And he was like, this kid, and this thing breaks into their cabin or whatever. Yeah, yeah.

So I always thought, I just made it up. I thought, oh, yeah, I was just a kid. I had an imagination and it didn't happen. And then years later, I'm like, whoa, like people today are still describing the dogman, seeing him all over the place. It's weird that it chooses a wolf, a dog. Why? Why the wolf?

Why not any other creature? The werewolf tends to be prevalent in the West in the Americas, because, I mean, that's where you find large populations of wolves to begin with. But in other parts of the world, you have other rare creatures. You know, they're were hyenas, wear jaguars, and things like that. You know, the Olmec actually worshipped a weird jaguar. Interesting. I mean, there's a lot of stories out of post-Renissance France or in Germany as well.

Oh, my, yes. where they had a lot of werewolves and similar. Yes, and it's interesting that you bring that up because it coincides with the witch craze in early modern Europe that took place in the 1500s and 1600s. And you often find those accounts, you know, not universally, but it's not uncommon to find them in conjunction with some sort of witchcraft. That's not to say that every witch turned in by a witch finder general was necessarily, you know, somebody who had made some Faustian pact.

There were lots of innocent people that were killed, particularly in Germany. You know, there are weather witchers and people that were still worshipping versions of the old Norse gods. You know, that stuff was still prevalent in the hinterlands and the backcountry in German-speaking regions of Europe. As to France, yeah, there are numerous accounts of werewolfism. The one that sticks out in my mind and is probably the most curious and perhaps even the most well attested is the beast of gervadon about the the werewolf sightings and in killings

in southern France and there was even a movie that was partially on the legend they used the legend as a sort of backdrop for the story but if you guys remember the brotherhood of the wolf that french film that came out about 2002 used the the tale of the beast of gervon as a backdrop for that but it was a series of killings that took place that had been ascribed to this war wolf creature that was scouring the country in southern France. Didn't they have a hunt for this thing with like a silver bullets and all the things they needed to do? Yeah, all of the classical apatropaeics were used. And what's the deal with like the wooden steak and the cross and the garlic and the silver bullets? Well, some of the methods used for dispatchment are more folkloric and tied ethnically to the natural

environments of a given culture. Some of them come out of Judeo-Christian tradition. Let's take garlic first. You know, garlic being one of the classical repellents for vampires. Well, we know now, and certainly ancient peoples knew that garlic was good for your health, is good for your cardiovascular system. Like it can actually, if you take enough of it, it can actually do the same thing that statins do for clearing excess, you know, triglycerides and cholesterol and stuff like that out of your system. So it has a direct impact on the health of your blood.

And the fact that ancient peoples used that as far back as the Egyptians used it to try and repel evil spirits. The fact that it was used in antiquity as not only a food source, but also an apotropaic speaks volumes about why it would be used against these. you know, vampiric creatures. In the case of stakes, there are a number of kinds of, you know, of course, one of the classic dispatchments in Eastern Europe for a vampire was the actual impelation of the vampire. Whether they're a vampire or not, you shove a stake through somebody's chest. That's going to, that's going to end their activity really quick. But what's always been interesting to me are the kinds of woods that were used to make these stakes, like the Hawthorne and in particular the aspen or the poplar.

The poplar is thought to have been the wood that was used to make the cross. And it's why poplar family trees like the aspens, you know, if you see wind blowing through an aspen, it looks like it looks like it's alive. It looks like it's trembling. And that's where the Latin name for the tree, Aspen, popular tremulous, comes from because it's supposedly trembling in shame because its wood was used to make the cross. And so there's a kind of religious tie-in with the usage of poplar woods to make sticks. As for silver, I've heard a number of arguments.

One is that, again, just as like we know today, that silver has anti-microbial properties. You can be used as an antibiotic in small doses, especially the colloidal silver, They had of my silver. I mean, it's, people knew this in antiquity. I mean, it's why they made silverware. You know, silverware originally was, you know, it really was silver. It's why they ate off of silver plates is because they knew that this stuff had antimicrobial properties. And you know what they say about the full moon is that the microbes in your body double on the full moon?

Yes. You're actually, the parasites in your guts are churning, why people can't sleep on the full moon. Yes, and we've actually got another full moon coming on October 31st, if I'm not mistaken. Well, Nate, don't look out your window. Good gosh. I mean, if this stuff doesn't convert you, I don't know what will. What other kind of stories of like putting out, I mean, the fact you can put out crosses on the ground and you wake up with people on them, that's nuts. What other legendary stories do you have for us in that vein to showcase?

This isn't just something that we're making up. One of the most famous cases of witchcraft, the Luciferian killings in Matamoros, which is a town just across the border from Brownsville, Texas. The surface story was that this guy was practicing Santa Ria, which is a kind of syncretistic religion akin to voodoo or condomble in Brazil. But a iconography in the place was clearly, it was also Luciferian. And that's the danger in a lot of solitary witches is that they'll mix and match. It's self-styled. It's been my experience that that speaks of direct tutelage from a demon. And I write about that in a chapter in my book on interview with the giant, which people can reference.

But the Matamora incident is really dark because it brings to the four not only witchcraft, but it also brings to the four the emulation of vamprism because these were blood rituals that were taking. I mean, there are three college students that were. killed in the rituals. They'd just cross the border to have a good time and got picked up. Now, now those kinds of kidnappings still take place and probably with more frequency. That's why the State Department has issued a lot of prohibitions or cautions against, you know, people crossing the border into northern Mexico in particular. Gosh, I remember when I was in college, people used to go down to Tijuana girls,

college girls get drunk on the weekends from slow. Did I want to T.J.? Yeah. It was safe then. Oh, yeah, maybe. Maybe when you're 6'5 and you look like Hulk Hogan. It was like 2002 maybe. I'm talking like two or three girls with Drive-Down. That's just done.

Cash, I'm 6-2-2-2-30. I'm not even going to do that. What are some other, and this brings up an interesting point. There's a lot of people who just go through life and they're just neutral. They don't think this evil exists. What are some stupid things that people do to make themselves susceptible to this stuff? where like a Ouija boards and is the first thing people think about where you're just being a dummy you're basically given the keys to someone to just take over

well that was the first one that popped to mind as the Ouija boards and in general any attempt to try and contact you know the dead the problem there is that yeah people people are contacting the dead but they're not contacting the dead that they think they are there's one tribe of giants called the Refayim. And that name is generally translated as either the frighteners or the shades or the dead ones. And etymologically, this goes back to that first part of the name, Roth. Remember, there aren't any vowels in these ancient Semitic languages.

That name shows up in Phoenician, Euguritic literature about their mythology. It also shows up in Mesopotamia. In fact, it's a word that's associated with the underworld in both of those cultures, in Mesopotamia and in Phoenician and Canaanite religion. It was a place where the Mesopotamians thought that their revered dead ancestor kings went to. There are all kinds of associations with other creatures in Mesopotamian mythology, like the Apcalo and the Ananaki. But that name is even retained not only in the tribal name of the Refayim,

in the Levant, but in names like Hamarabi, that middle section of his name is an homage to these entities that live in the underworld. Ropp is also mentioned, or the Rop is mentioned in the Eucharitic literature as well, the stories about their mythology. So these people are under the auspices of spiritualism and mediumship. They are contacting quote unquote the dead, but they're not the dead that they think they are because there's a lot of nefarious theater going on in the spirit world to get people to make themselves susceptible. And whether it's a Ouija board or scrying or any kind of divination or like that, there's a reason why these practices were prohibited in the Old and New Testament.

It wasn't to thwart your curiosity about the supernatural, is that they were genuinely dangerous, that you imperiled your very being by accessing this world. And so, you know, in its modern forms, whether it's, you know, again, scrying or looking, you know, looking into mirrors or divination or Ouija boards or whatever, it's just that Ouija boards are so easy because you can, you just buy them like you would a board game. Yeah, I've heard stories of that people trying to burn them and throw them away and they come back and they're in the closet the next day. Yeah. And there's like all these stories. And I remember my sister was like, she came home one time. She was older than me, obviously.

I talked about that on this episode. where they played light as a feather and Bloody Mary in these games where they would try to lift people. There was a lot of creepy stuff in the 80s when we were kids, and I don't know if that stuff still goes on today. Yeah. I don't know. Some people are just, it's like they're driving drunk all the time. You know what I mean? Yeah.

Like, yeah, sometimes you can drive home drunk, but eventually it's going to kill you, right? Right. Yeah, it's a law of average, this kind of thing. I mean, you can't beat the odds. You know, your first experience, or even a strength. of experiences of them might be completely innocuous, but how are you going to predict medium session or that playing on the Ouija board and you let one of these ancient malevolent entities into your life? What about the weirdest stories? Like people have like toys that get

possessed. Like I've heard so many stories of like dolls walking around or like little dollhouses where like, I heard this one story about these dolls or they were reenacting murder scenes and they would come back to their house and they would look in their doll. house and they're like strangling and trying to kill each other. And I'm in just some creepy stories. Like what what's like what lets those in? Well how do you how does a dollhouse get possessed? Like how does that how does that even happen? The same way that you know for millennia items and artifacts and in totems and things like that have been infused with spiritual energy. It wasn't the idol itself. It was whatever inhabited the idol. Right. That's a that's an excellent example is that you know I. Idle

in the ancient world, they worked as these conduits, you know, because so much of the worship attention and energy was focused on these idols that there was a connection made between the spirits that would use them and dwell them or, you know, again, however you want to contextualize that. By that same token, you know, physical things, inanimate things can be occupied. And I bring that up because a lot of my friend, modern day Christians, think that ancient people who wrote the Bible were stupid because they did worship golden calves and stuff like that. They're like, well, if you just read the Bible, those guys were dumb. So obviously a lot of the stuff they wrote wasn't based in any reality. Like you have to take what they wrote with the grain of salt

when they talk about the gods and stuff. And I'm like, no, no, no, these idols were possessed. They weren't stupid in worshipping a pair of boots. You know what I mean? There was something in the boots. Yeah. And it was seducing these cultures, especially. the Israelites to what, to leave their wanderlust, right? Like, I'm going to go over here. Yeah, yeah. And when you read that, you know, that they built, they melted down all their account in Exodus, when they melted down all their gold and they made a golden calf, which I've heard anything

from Apis to Hathor, you know, could have been the God. What sort of gets lost and would have been implicit for the readership of an ancient audience that's not immediately evident to us. And again, this is why it's so important. to understand the culture, the context, the anthropology of the biblical world, is that in the process of melting all that gold down and building this idol up, that was not just craftsmanship, tradesmanship, but it was ritual too. Ritual designed to do exactly what you're talking about to bring in these entities to end dwell during the ritual processes of whatever these people

were observing at the time. That's wild. Yeah. I mean, how do you, how do you protect yourself? I mean, do you carry garlic in your pockets? No. That would just make everything more delicious on one. It's not a bad idea.

Of course. Yeah. Garlic makes everything better, right? Anyway, your first line of defense is your faith. If there's one thing that these things are scared of, it's Jesus. It's just, you know. And that kind of sound, I know that sounds like, Sunday school answer, but that's the truth. I mean, I can't tell you how many accounts,

whether I've heard, whether it's of people who are being attacked by demons, they're trying to endwell them, or I've even heard of people being attacked by mothman, entities that claim to be extraterrestrials that have invaded, you know, the homes of people. I can't tell you how many times I've heard people who've simply called out in prayer to Jesus at that time, even mentioning the name of Jesus and the whole experience dissipates. The things depart because they're they piss their pants.

Yeah. They know what they're I mean I'm sorry to put it in such such crude terms but that's how afraid they are of Jesus. That wasn't that crude. Could have gone way dirtier. You could have you could have duded your shoulders. Exactly. Yeah.

Yeah. But you know, there's been several times in my life where I've had sleep paralysis. and I'm caught in, it feels like I'm caught in dimensions. Have you ever had that Luke where you're like half asleep, you can't move? Oh yeah. Yes. I always wake up screaming the name Jesus.

What is that? Are we, are we like crossing paths with these things? Yeah, well, yeah. I mean, you know, that sleep paralysis used to be called the old hag syndrome because people felt like what they wrote off as a witch, you know, was like pressing down on them and wouldn't let them up. They were just trying and trying to move, but they couldn't. And they were in mortal terror.

So, yeah, I think that there's a spiritual component. There's a demonic component to it. Because, again, yeah, I mean, you have to, you have to remember the strategy here, the MO of these things, is not for our betterment, is not to do things that help us, but to hurt us, you know. I mean, they literally are out to harm us, kill us, persuade us to their side if they can. So, yeah, I mean, I think it's a, these kinds of experiences are examples of where their realm comes into contact with ours because they're always trying to get at us. They always want to be, they always want to end dwell. How revolutionary would it be if you could haul off all agnostics and middle of the road folks to an exorcism and give them a firsthand experience with. this stuff. What do you think their reaction would be and how would they feel? Yeah, well, I mean,

I think, I think some people would do their drawers. Well, yeah, I mean, there's some people that would take away from that experience, you know, you know, they'd be convinced, you know, at that point because they themselves had experienced, you know, until you experience something, and it's often easy to write something off, but I can't help but think that, you know, even after, you know, experiencing something like that, they would, they would still be looking for the naturalistic, you know, rationale for whatever had just happened. But these things are speaking dead languages and their contorting bodies. I mean, those are the counts that got me going, wow.

They must be the, they must be spirits of antiquity, right? Yeah. I mean, you know, like me, if you're a historian by trade or a paleographer or somebody who deals with ancient languages and a piggerfer, and you see and hear this stuff, coming out of somebody, there's bafflement there, especially if you're coming from a secular perspective, you know, you don't subscribe to a supernatural worldview. You're like, your first inclination is to think, okay, well, at some point in time, this person was exposed to Aramaic or Acadian or something like that. But when you find out the background of some of these people,

you know, they've never had Latin, they've never had Greek, they've never had Hebrew, they never had, you know, fill in the blank. And they're speaking this stuff with fluency. That ought to be an indicator to even the staunchest of scholar that something is at work here that is not within our materialistic explanation of the universe. And why that isn't even considered as a possibility boggles my mind. But at the same time, I understand it because as we pointed out in the last discussion, the objective truth has just been thrown out the window.

There's no... It's all relative. If we're, yeah, or it's all relative. If we're concerned with objective truth, then, you know, no matter how fantastical it seems on the surface, we need to at least consider it. And there isn't even a consideration amongst mainstream scholars, you know, about the supernatural reality of this thing,

which does us no favors. Well, if vampires and werewolves are connected to the demons and these spirits, you told us a couple stories of your friend, you couldn't move your friend. What's another story of an exorcism or a demon extraction? Well, it's a story that's actually connected with that same incident. The young man in question had cast spills on another friend of his, former friend anyway. And that's how we found out about it is because my brother was friends with both of these guys.

But the young man who had been demon possessed cast basically a series of revest. spills against another person. And the spell was basically that he would have car trouble. And in the space of about a year, this kid had wrecked five cars after this spill was cast. You know, I knew that that he had wrecked these cars because I kept asking my brother, what in the world? Why do they keep getting him a car if you can't, if you can't drive it straight on the road? And then after after this fellow told me all of this, it began to make sense. well Halloween Halloween huh be careful out there kids yeah yeah don't screw around and the weird thing about being a parent is

I remember when I was a kid we weren't allowed to watch the Smurfs because all the witchcraft that was connected to the Smurfs plus they were a communist plus there was just one girl in the tribe was a little weird oh it was a little strange dude well I mean there is the there's a sort of campiness about about it all I guess the superficial you know just sort of look at it as sort of poking fun or laughing at the devil.

But even that, you know, is kind of dangerous in the end. And I just tell, I tell people, you know, look, I can't make that decision for you. It's a decision you have to have to come to the older I get. The more distance from the imagery of Halloween that I put between myself, simply because of all the things we know now about the roots of Halloween and that it was associated with, you know, these agrarian festivals that often did include human sacrifice. Why are we perpetuating the imagery, you know, of those, you know, in a case of Halloween,

which is largely based on the Celtic Festival of Sowan, although it finds its iterations and variations in other parts of the world, it was specifically, you know, speaking of portals, it was specifically thought of is this time when the veil between this world in the spiritual world, the supernatural world was thin, and these spirits and entities could be contacted. That should give us some pause, I think, on this side of the issue. Yeah, it's a little crazy, man, that the way that we commercialize and then dumb down

and fluff up some of these things that have roots in pretty gnarly evil stuff. For sure. I mean, that's really what it is. It's not that we have the people who are in the know have any magical powers. it's just that they're aware of the magic, right? And so, you know, pull your head out of your ass, sorry, and look at the evidence and realize you're in a cosmic war.

Yeah. Right? Is that, is it? And maybe go on a spiritual ride-along. Go find some exorcist and. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, go on a ride along and see the darkness, right?

I think a lot of deliverance ministers are willing to, you know, let people do that if they would just avail themselves of, the possibility. Well, I think some people just need that kind of evidence. They just need that kind of proof. It's like that old saying, Tommy Boy, you know, like I could get a good look at a T-bone stick by sticking my head up the bull's ass. Or just take the butcher's word for it. Yeah, so I could take

I'll take the exorcist's word for it, right? That this stuff's real, it's out there. But some people got to stick their head up the bull's ass. And I think that if you've got to do that, I would say maybe you have to do that. Some people have to go out and see this stuff or stand before they, they, I would like to add in the blur.

Creatures in no way is liable for any experiences you know. Since Nate's now encouraging this. Saying that, like, it's real, right? I don't know if Exorcists do that, bring people with them. Like a ride along these? Somebody to hold them down while the power of Christ compels them. That's right. We appreciate it.

Thanks so much for coming on and giving us a little. Yeah. Like I said, I'm happy to do it. And if people are interested, you know, they can look in my books and find a lot of this stuff by access to my website burden beyond.com and t ioba.org i've got a new one that's going to be coming up this month called the van helsingway which actually deals with a lot of the material we've been talking about the the demonic origins of folkloric monsters and within the next couple of days i'll actually have a number of books out i've got um

there'll be one on witchcraft and one on uh my approach to studying the paranormal. All right. Want to pick those up. Well, you heard it here on blurry creatures. There are vampires and werewolves still running around out there. You know, say your prayers at night

and take it seriously, I think. Absolutely. Check out Judd. Judd's got books coming out. Judd's been a fantastic guest. We'll have to bring them back again, yet again at some point, but check it out.

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