Haunted Cosmos - The Watchers, Artificial Intelligence, & Ancient Evils

Episode Date: May 17, 2023

Join us as we investigate the high strangeness found in the dark corners of God's spoken world.In this episode, Brian and Ben tackle what was to them a difficult topic to pin down: the Egregores, the Watchers of Gen. 6, and their continued attempts to trick us even today.Enjoy! We're glad you're here.Love Haunted Cosmos? Get access to our exclusive show, The Dusty Tome, early ad-free access to main episodes, monthly AMA's, and livestreams with Ben and Brian by becoming a patron of the show: https://www.patreon.com/c/HauntedCosmosBuy the Haunted Cosmos book: https://www.newchristendompress.com/cosmos PS: It's also available as an audiobook!Support the show

And when the sons of men had multiplied in those days, beautiful and comely daughters were born to them. And the watchers, the sons of heaven saw them and desired them. And they said to one another, come, let us choose for ourselves wives from the daughters of men, and let us beget for ourselves children. Then they all swore together and bound one another with a curse. And they were all of them, 200, who descended in the days of Jared, onto the peak of Mount Hermon. These and all the others with them took for themselves wives from among them such as they chose. And they began to go into them and to defile themselves through them,

and to teach them sorcery and charms, and to reveal to them the cutting of roots and plants. And they conceived from them and bore to them great giants. And the giants begat Nephilim. Excerpts from the first book of Enoch, chapter six and seven. In Second Temple Judaism, the period in Jewish history between the rebuilt, of the temple after the Babylonian exile through the coming of Christ.

The presence of the Egregor as a key player in history was nearly universally assumed. What is an Egregor? The term comes from the Greek word used to translate a biblical word used for certain angelic beings, which translates literally to wakeful or watchers. The lore of these angelic beings grew out of the biblical narrative, even all the way back to the sixth chapter of Genesis, where we find a description of what seems to be angelic beings intermingling with the daughters of men, rebelling against God and defying his order.

Our best and most thorough description of the lore surrounding that event is found in the sections of the first book of Enoch, an apocryphal work, which we just read for you in the intro. As an oral tradition passed down through millennia in Israel, the account of which we find only in this apocryphal book, we cannot know for certain whether or not this account is true to the bottom. It's certainly not the inerrant and divinely inspired scripture, more like a good window into the way that popular lore understood the world at this time. But these kinds of legendary accounts, of angelic demigods bringing forbidden knowledge to the masses, is certainly not unique to Second Temple Judaism.

They are in fact pervasive in history. Could they be a folkloric means of wrestling with the ancient history, the anti-deluvian world, and the sparring of cosmic forces standing in the shadows behind ancient empires? Could these stories have their roots in real encounters that the ancients experienced? As the stories go, these fallen beings, these egregor,

and their selfish lust sought to conquer and enslave humanity under a tyrannical and supernatural dominion, all cloaked in the guise of generosity, giving of gifts and knowledge. The fallen watchers were said to have brought advanced knowledge of everything from cosmetics, to astrology, to meteorology, the building of structure, the making of weapons,

and the practice of magic with reckless abandon, seeking to incite humanity to high rebellion against the true God, joining in the demonic war against the heavenly throne. This act would finally culminate in the divine judgment of the whole earth in the waters of Noah's flood. But the remnants of this wicked time continued, peeking out of the shadows in the Tower of Babel, in the gross and demonic practices of the Egyptians and the Canaanites and the Hittites and more. Thrones of men concealing lurking demonic powers, agrigoric powers propping up human kingdoms, demanding and receiving the worship of men in blood rights and sexual deviancy and human sacrifice.

The fertility gods, the gods of the sun, the earth mothers, all of these find their nexus in the fallen watchers who help spread man's sin to its fringes, or so the story goes. Read through the proper lens, these stories can actually serve to establish a paradigm by which one can understand all of pagan religion.

Pagan religion is demon worship. The attempt to seize sovereignty from the true God to build powers and empires and thrones in defiance of the kingdom and throne of God, even using the poisoned gifts of demonic knowledge as weapons shaken at the walls of heaven.

As wild as this may sound, we see hints of God, of this demonic strategy, even in the pages of Scripture. For example, in the 10th chapter of the book of Daniel, in that chapter, Daniel receives an angelic visitation with an astonishing glimpse behind the veil and into the supernatural realm of our embattled cosmos. The angel tells Daniel that he would have brought his message

three weeks earlier, yet, quote, the prince of the kingdom of Persia withstood me 21 days. But Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me, for I was left there with the kings of Persia and came to make you understand what is to happen to your people in the latter days. Did you catch that? The angelic messenger was opposed by a demonic entity

who stood behind the kings of Persia until the great Archangel Michael came to his aid. The watchers indeed seemed to stand behind the pagan throne in all their terrible power. In October 1936, renowned psychologist Carl Jung was delivering a lecture to the Abernithian Society at St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London. The lecture was titled The Concept of the Collective Unconscious. In this lecture, he stated the following, quote,

My thesis then is as follows, in addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature in which we believe to be the only empirical psyche, even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix, there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature, which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually, but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily, and which give definite form to certain psychic contents.

End quote. In this lecture, Young exposited an exciting new idea. he had developed in an earlier essay entitled The Significance of Constitution and Heredity in Psychology. In this paper, he would further describe the implications of this, quote, collective unconscious as follows, quote, The existence of the collective unconscious means that individual consciousness is anything but a tabularasa and is not immune to predetermining influences. On the contrary, it is the highest degree influenced by inherited presuppositions, quite apart from the

the unavoidable influences exerted upon it by the environment." End quote. In developing the idea of the collective unconscious, Young attempted to scientifically describe an unavoidable aspect of human history. Why did every culture have similar tropes in their own unique mythologies? Why was there a flood, or a creator, or a tree of life, or an earth mother, or first parents, or some type of monsters that at some point came down to help or terrorized man? The common threat of human experience could not possibly be explained by some supernatural or higher being actually existing.

It could in no wise be because humanity actually did have a shared history with distinct beginnings, courtesy of a supernatural and divine creator. Evolution does not allow this. Young postulated then that it must be because our shared evolutionary history left something common in the deep recesses of our minds. primordial archetypes that stemmed from the hopes, triumphs, and fears of our most distant evolutionary ancestors. These primordial archetypes, the tree of life, the tower to heaven, the wise old man, the firegiver and the sword maker, the trickster, to name a few, were emotionally charged reactions to things that did take place at some time in our evolutionary journey,

attempts of that dumb, ancient man to describe massively important events beyond his comprehension. And because the memory of these events lurked in the human mind in the form of these archetypes, they in a sense became real. They were not physical beings, but rather common memories of the collective unconscious. What Young did not expect was the deeply grotesque consequence of this idea, an idea that was so tantalizingly close to touching a grand and far older truth, but yet remained so fallen and short. You see, moderns know in their hearts and minds that the material,

The materialist lie is just that, a lie. We all know there's plenty more to this world than just stuff. Operating on this subconscious presupposition present in every man, coupled with the, quote, new ideas of young, people discovered something most cultures had forgotten in modernity. It appeared humans. If enough of them shared a conviction or idea could create something new. Some entity born of the collective thought of few or many,

a monster of consciousness, born from the deprable. efforts of fallen minds. Thus the Egregor, a concept lost to history for the mainstream, became popular once again. Not necessarily as a fallen watcher from heaven, but instead in the thought form, a being supposedly manifested by the spiritual powers latent in humanity itself. These thought-form beings still supposedly lusts

to spread secret knowledge and ability to any group with the conviction to conjure them through their intense focus. What was to Second Temple Judaism, a historical event, has become to moderns nothing more than a myth, a relic of the collective unconscious. But not a myth without power, rather one that establishes man's ability to conjure from mere thought monsters or demons, or even angels with power beyond the sum total of those who have summoned it. So they think at least.

But who's to say the demonic powers, no less real today than they were in the ancient times, aren't using this materialist perspective to propagate their message to sow the seeds of deception in the fertile soil of materialist mysticism. We may not have physical giants roaming the earth, corrupting her people, but think of how many movements, how many obviously malevolent practices and ideologies have latched on to people,

bringing about a state of conviction that can only be described as a religious fervor. The egregore is not dead and gone, not yet at least. Welcome to this episode of the Haunted Cosmos. My name is Ben Garrett. I'm joined here by Brian Savay. Say hello. Man, it is great to be here haunting the cosmos again with you, my guy, Ben Garrett. Haunting that old cosmos.

And today we are talking about simply the most unhinged topic. Like, we got you hooked with some sea serpents and some like, okay, I can follow you. And then we're like, let's talk about Carl Jung, the collective unconscious, agri-gore and Inakian magic. Let's talk about giants, but not at all in the way you think. but not what you expect. Let's talk about the Nephilimic false gods. Yeah. Man.

No, no, no. Let's not talk about the Nephilim. Let's talk about their dads. I'm here for it, Ben. We were going to talk. This whole episode was like, ooh, you know what it would be cool is that we talked about Tulpas. Because it's this thought form that the individual conjures.

It's obviously demonic. And it is, by the way. But then I got sucked into this Egregor black hole. Yeah, because it goes deep. Now I cannot escape from it. The Tulpa is just a little. little blossom in the 18th century, or sorry, I think even the 19th century. Yeah, much newer. On the branch of the ancient concept of the egregor. Yes. Yes. The egregore, as I want to say.

The egregor, with the red sauce. Yeah. So I'm going to give a brief thesis, restating what we said in the intro. Yeah. So it's really clear to people where we're trying to go with this. Yeah. The concept of the Egregor is relatively heady. I mean, it's just, it's, it's very immaterial. Unavoidably, yeah. Yes. And the connection that we're making between the old classical definition, which is the fallen watcher from heaven, and then this new one, which is the collective unconscious, like conjuring a thing, is not always evident right away.

And even after the first explanation, it doesn't quite click. So here, here's my attempt to explain it again. In older times, the common man knew that the world was spiritual. the existence of these demon gods who brought gifts to man that ultimately led to their ruin was known and it was accepted. Now, though, the world is a more materialist place, full of people blind to the spiritual things that go on. So it's my speculation, and I have to emphasize this is speculation, that perhaps these old demon gods, the literal fallen egregore that we do believe existed, perhaps they're playing into the materialist trope, revealing themselves rather through the collective thought form

to more efficiently spread the lies to humanity so that they might be ruined. So essentially it's the same being just running a different play, but with the same goal in mind. So we're saying that in the ancient world, people understood that even human powers had standing behind them supernatural powers. Yes.

They just understood this. They understood that the kings were some sort of connection or representative or even descendant in their mythos and their mythology. from the gods. Yes. And now, while we don't believe that, we believe actually because we're so proud and arrogant. Because we're so smart. We actually believe that we can create angelic, supernatural, whatever kind of beings through our collective

unconscious, just believing in them and meditating on them, and we have this psychic force. And so we create them. And you're saying, the demons know that. Yes. And so they are actually manifesting some of the things that people are trying to do. Yes. as a way of deceiving them. Yes.

That is 4D chess. Also crazy unhinged. Yeah. Like the arrogant materialist modern is like, oh, well, I can gain this divine power and master something far beyond myself if I just create this egregor, this collective thought form. Yeah. Well, the actual egregor, the fallen demon. The demons.

Watcher is looking at that going, well, sure. Oh, you want that? Okay. But ultimately, it's the demons who are trying to still be the puppet masters and spread deception. So hopefully that makes sense. going forward. Because this whole episode is going to be trying to prove that that connection is at least compelling. So the people think that they are in charge.

Yes. And sometimes the demons will let them think that. Yes. But the demons are really the ones doing the deceiving. Precisely. Precisely. This is not on the notes. Is this related to like the secret?

Positive manifestation kind of thing? No, it really. A lot of it is because all of this stuff is very, it's very agnostic. where it's looking for this secret, or wait, is that synostic? Mystic, it's Gnostic. Yeah, it's Gnostic. Secret knowledge. Which is looking for this secret knowledge.

So all of them are trying to find, they think that there's some keys to the universe so that they can unlock a higher power. Yeah. Really, when you look at it from the evolutionary perspective, it's an attempt to ascend to the next plane of humanity. Okay. Where they're like, we have to evolve somehow,

and they think this is how. So they might even think that the psychical powers of humanity is actually just a physical feature that we maybe don't fully understand. 100%. And so they can tap into it and evolve it. So look at this way. And ascend to a new plane of existence. Yes.

Because what we would describe as like a supernatural or spiritual thing, they would probably say is some element of the human psyche that we don't know yet. Interesting. So it's unavoidable that these things happen. And Carl Young is a perfect example of noticing that this is real, but wanting to figure out a naturalist explanation. for it. Interesting. So that's where you get the collective unconscious where people are just like, oh, it's not that we, it's not that it's supernatural. It's that we can do it. We just don't know how yet. We're actually just far more powerful than we think. It reminds me somewhat of Graham Hancock in the ancient apocalypse series, popular in Netflix right now. Great series, yeah. Where he's totally anti-Christian. In fact, he's like really pro-DMT. Investigation of hallucinogenic spiritual realms. It's a great way to run into the hat man. Seriously. As you know, if you listen to our last episode.

So Graham Hancock is he often talks about these ancient legends of like almost demigodd figures who would bring knowledge to civilizations out of the flood. Yes. Out of the catastrophe. Which almost every ancient civilization has that myth. Yeah. So there's just another example of a guy who rejects the biblical foundations of reality who attempts to sort of overlay reality with this news. he's going to tell a story that's going to make sense of the data. Yes.

And that's his story. Yes. So this is just one more example of those kinds of stories, secularist or demonic or pagan overlays onto reality to attempt to subvert what God has created. Yeah. Interesting. And before we move forward, I want you to define another term for people. We've tossed this word around a little bit in this episode.

Yeah. Can you tell us, again, what anti-deluvian means? Okay. Anti-deluvian is just the period before the Noahic. Flood. Pre-flood. It's a period where we have the Nephilim and we have the growth of this civilization that was so opposed to God that the thoughts and intentions of man's heart, man's heart, was only evil all the time. Yeah. And so there was a whole world that existed before the flood. The scriptures even call it the world that then was. Yes. It's a whole literally a, the first time a new world occurred. It's a decreation, recreation,

creation event. And there are several of these in scripture. One of them is the cross of Christ. Yep. And I think we're going to talk about some of that. Yeah, we will. We will. But anyway, yeah. I just wanted to make sure people knew in case this is their first episode. Sure. Yeah. Antediluvian is just a fancy word for pre-flood. Yep. So since this is probably the farthest from common sense that I've ever ventured. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. At least for a sustained period of time. I want to go ahead and share just a side take that is perhaps even less hinged than the rest of this. Difficult, but let's hear it.

Yeah, so in the collective unconscious idea that Young gives to these students in London, he mentions all the common primordial archetypes. Yeah. The old wise man, the first parents of everyone. One of them that he mentions is the Earth Mother. Right? So many, especially in Celtic pagan religions,

many ancient peoples worshipped the earth mother deity. Today we have it in environmentalism, like raging environmentalism, where they literally talk about the Mother Earth as if she's mad at us for harming her. Okay, this is why I think spirals are evil.

Okay, here we go, guys. You guys, I just want you to know this is a take of Ben Garrett. This is not endorsed by Refuge Church. This is not endorsed by Brian Sovey. But I'm open to being convinced, Ben. Let's hear it. Spirals are evil.

I'm going to give you a quick, the elevator pitch as to why. Because we have to keep moving. Elevator pitch. Think of the silver chair, the Narnia story. I often do. The evil queen under the earth. She's posing as a queen. What is she really?

She's a descendant of Lilith. She is a descendant of Lilith, but what does she turn into? A snake. She turns into a snake. What is the symbol that represents the Earth Mother in all of these Celtic religions? You may not know. It's a spiral. And in those religions, the Earth Mother,

the Earth Mother was supposed to be embodied in a serpent. Really? And you get in Matthew 25, you're talking about the soldiers. The soldiers, the Roman soldiers, probably Matthew 27. Later in Matthew. I'm not going to hang my hat on a chapter. It's in Matthew. It's in the book of Matthew, where the Greek word used to describe the Roman soldiers

surrounding Christ and beating him before his crucifixion is the Greek word for spiral. Okay. So like a serpent. A serpent, to represent a serpent. The argument is that in all ancient cultures, the symbol of the spiral was supposed to represent a serpent. Any time it was represented, it was either represented in Hebrew, like biblical texts as evil, because it represented the enemy, or in pagan religions as their god, which we would say is a demon god, false god. Ergo, spirals are evil. Ergo, like, such as the Iraq.

Yes. In the words of Miss America, or whatever it was. So moving on. Anyway, all right, guys. That was the least hinged take you've heard so far on Haunted Cosmos. But that's why you're here, listeners. People are compelled. You're here so that your unhinged side can be justified a little bit.

I can feel my future support growing. Yeah, we're recording this before anyone's heard even one episode. Like, this could be a way. There could be like one of you, listen. to this and you're like, this is crazy. This could be a funny. All right, so spirals are evil. Spirals are evil and then moving on.

And the demons are tricking people by letting them do the secret manifestation. Yes. Okay. And birds aren't real. And, well, birds aren't real.com. Yeah. Check it out. No, this is, in all seriousness, this idea that we're trying to make some connections

with here isn't completely new. We're not the first ones to come up with it. Michael Heiser has a really popular book called The Reversing of Herman. And it's because in this Inoccian text that expounds the watchers falling and then creating the Nephilim, it says that they descend upon Mount Hermon. That's where all of this begins. So the idea is that in this antediluvian world, there was so much corruption, so much evil that propagated, both in the heart of depraved man and then also helped along by these demons,

that part of Christ's fundamental mission in his incarnation was chaining these things. demons under the earth and reversing Herman. So instead of Hermon being Mount Hermon, being associated with this perfect example of the fallen state of the world, it instead would become a depiction of God's blessing on his people. And this is supported with text like Psalm 133. Like Doe of Herman. Where it says that the do of Herman will fall on the people like the everlasting life that God has promised to them. Great setting of that Psalm. You can hear from Brian Sobe. You can hear from Brian Sobe. If you ever want to hear it. Yeah, no, exactly, exactly.

So, Ben, I think it would be helpful to help people have a handle on some of the things that we're talking about. By giving some examples of how this idea has developed and shown itself at various times in history, and even relatively, we're talking about thousands of years. So relatively recent history, you know, not that many hundreds of years ago, why don't you tell us about John D. in the Inoccian magic tradition? Yeah, I will say, to me, this is the most, striking example of a very explicit and semi-modern egregor that begins with the court astronomer for Queen Elizabeth I, who you just said, his name's John D. Not an obscure guy. This is not an obscure guy. He's a

genius of his time. I'm going to quote a part of his preface to one of his manuscripts right here, because it'll give us a good introduction for John's whole premise and conceit in doing all of this in the first place. Excellent. So he says, quote, I have from my youth up desired and prayed unto God for pure and sound wisdom and understanding of truths, natural, and artificial, so that God's wisdom, goodness, and power bestowed in the frame of the world might be brought in some bountiful measure under the talent of my capacity. So for many years and in many places far and near, I've sought and studied many books in sundry languages,

and have conferred with sundry men, and have labored with my own reasonable discourse to find some inkling, gleam, or beam of those radical truths. but after all my endeavors, I could find no other way to attain such wisdom, but by the extraordinary gift, and not by any vulgar school, doctrine, or human invention. End quote. And that is in his preface to a document called Sloan-M.S. 3188, which is an introduction to a manuscript that we'll be discussing more in a little bit.

John was not an obscure man, and he did not stand before obscure men in his day. But, as with most prominent men, he was not content with his state. He thought that he should have more knowledge, that he should be more widely renowned in the intelligentsia. Pride goeth before the fall. Pride go before the fall. Amen. Ultimately, John sought by a journey into occult practices to achieve three things.

One, the unification of the Catholic and Protestant churches under a shared banner of Christendom, no small goal. Two, a place as the authority in all matters pertaining to the secret realms of creation. and three, a method of doing this that was founded on his strict conviction that numbers were the basic and fundamental units of knowledge and power. In fact, he believed that through mathematics, man could achieve a power akin to that of the divine, rivaling the ancient of days for his seat upon the throne of eternity.

This later point especially, combined with the others, would prove the downfall of John D. As years and lifetimes later, he is remembered as the founder of a sect of, of occultism that influenced and encouraged the likes of Alistair Crowley, the infamous most wicked man in the world. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. John was inspired by what he believed to be a theology of ancient peoples, anti-deluvian peoples, that was pure and undefiled by the infighting present in all people groups after the biblical flood. Due to the lack of resources pertaining to the details of this ancient theology, though, he had to seek it elsewhere. He had to seek the details of this theology elsewhere. John began holding what he called, quote, supernatural conferences

with his associate Edward Kelly, where they would try their hand at peeking into the unseen and forgotten by means of occult rituals, crystal balls, fasting, and incantation. There is a proverb from King Solomon that says it is the glory of God to conceal a thing, and the glory of kings is in searching those things out. Well, John D. was no king, and he was certainly no sage, for either would know that were God has placed firm limits, man seeks to push past them at his own peril. D and Kelly pushed until finally they started getting something. Kelly, seemingly possessed by something from the other side, would begin speaking in a foreign tongue, dictating hidden secrets of the universe to John, who transcribed what he heard but had no way of knowing what any of it actually meant.

That was, until Kelly started translating for John those things he had written. Kelly claimed that an angel had been speaking through him to John using his own native tongue and was now doing them the service of translating all that was said so that the common man could finally have this gift of new knowledge. The native language, which Dee initially called angelical, is now more commonly known by the moniker, Inocyan. The product of these unholy ceremonies was a collection of manuscripts called the Liber Logaeath, the book of the speech of God. It was incidentally referred to by as the book of Enoch, due to its being completely dependent on the information shared by those watchers, the Egregore, so heavily featured in the earlier Jewish work. The Liber Logueath contains

96 complex magical grids, and the point of all these is that they unlock some geometrical key by which you can use them as some sort of incantation to open up the divine. They call it the mystical Heptarky, a secret order of higher knowledge that reveals all secrets of the universe to anyone who can attain it. Now, dear listener, let me curb your knee-jerk reaction here before you get too far ahead and reacting to these things and just assume that John D. and Ed Kelly were just crazy charlatans who are trying to get a cult following, but kind of shooting a little over the marks. It sounds crazy, but remember, these are influential guys. It's tempting to think they were just

crazy. He's an influential man, very intelligent, and he ended up being highly influential. Okay. So today, even today, you have practitioners of this sort of Inoccian magic, and they still use a series of these keys, that he called them keys, chanted to the angels in order to commune with supernatural beings and get this secret knowledge. And the bottom line is that what this serves to do for these people is that it completely draws them away. into demonic deception and even serious and influential demonic deception like what you see with Alistair Crowley. Alistair Crowley is one of the followers of John D.

influenced by him in the late 18, he was born in the late 1800s, did most of this in the early 1900s. He invented a new occultic religion philosophy called Thilema. And according to Alistair Crowley, this was the means by which he would act as a high profit in humanity's next phase of spiritual development. Again, you see this idea of evolution, spiritual development, men becoming ascending to higher planes of existence. This higher plane he called the aeon of Horace. Horace. Rings a bell. It should ring a bell for you. Horace. Go ahead. Ben, tell us. I was just going to say, Horace does ring a bell. And I also want to point out and note that

These people always come away with some sort of eminency, where they're like, oh, it's imminent that we do this now. We're ready to evolve right now. Anyway, back to Horace. That is the name of an old Egyptian god, a false god in Egypt. And you should know that this revelation of thelemma, this new religion that Crowley was founder of, the revelation came to him from an entity known as Ivas,

as he and his wife were practicing in Nalkian magic in Cairo, Egypt. So even geographically there's a connection here. We would posit that much of this is not the work of a madman, that Crowley was actually not just crazy, but rather this was the work of one who was deceived by those entities who have helped us further in our corruption from the very beginning. Some modern say the egregor is merely a thought form, composed from the shared conviction of many,

but we say not so. Rather, these are the same fallen reprobates, running a new play on the weak mind of our modern. populace. How pleased those ancient demons of Egypt must be that even after Christ has put them to open shame, they're still able to deceive a few naive youth who obstinately refuse the lifeblood Christ offers. Yeah, so what you're seeing in these, what we're saying is that the demons are still working to deceive the nations. He's still trying to do that. And what they're going to fine, unfortunately for them is that because Christ has bound the strong man and he's plundering

his house, he's plundering the nations, they're going to be increasingly frustrated in their work as the gospel spreads. And as the true light that God gives freely to men through scriptures, it spreads, it brings light to the world. But the demonic entities are not going to go without a fight. They're going to attempt to drag people back into the darkness. Yes. And so certainly you do see some charlatans, many charlatans in history, who claim supernatural encounters and things like that, there's often debate surrounding men like Muhammad or Joseph Smith about whether they really had angelic encounters or if they just made it up. What we're saying is that at least some of these men really did, really did have spiritual encounters. Yes. That they actually, in attempting to open

the door, being deceived by their own hubris and pride, saying, I want to seek secret knowledge, I'm going to seek, I'm powerful enough, I'm smart enough, I can handle it. I'm not content with what God has revealed. I'm going to go and seek to communion with demons and seances and these other supernaturalists and through mediums and necromancers and things like this. It's not that those things are all fake. Yeah. They actually end up finding themselves in communion with something.

It just happens to be an ancient, undying, malevolent demon who's intent on dragging them to hell with as many people as they possibly can. And frankly, it's kind of foolish to deny that this is at least a possibility. Because you look at the antediluvian world, and you apparently had these fallen watchers and Nephilim giants, you know, walking around like it was no big deal. You know, you can actually see them. Maybe the giants help you build something. Okay. And then after the flood, you have the bulk of them wiped out, but there's still a lingering threat, right?

You have the Canaanite land that is completely wide. washed, you know, saturated with the influence of these people. And even you have remnants of the giants and the sons of Anak and the Anachim. So you have these lingering threats after the victory has been won. In fact, this would just not make any sense. If the same wasn't true after Christ's overwhelming victory, that there's still work to be done. That there's still people that he deploys to go and fight these spiritual battles

and pray and depend on him for victory. but the lingering threat of that evil is still there. It's not that it's completely hamstrung. It's that Christ has won, so the end is determined, but you still have to work that out in history. So they're still able to try and deceive people. Now, Brian, how do we tow the line between it being the glory of kings to seek something out? Yeah.

And then also knowing when to stop, when to be content with where our limits are. Like, how do we do that? I think the key is simply to obey God and his clear commandments. So what you have here is the instinct of people to attempt to leverage supernatural encounters to get knowledge, to have these angelic experiences, seances, wiji boards, whatever it is, to say, I'm now going to seek knowledge from some sort of spiritual power. You see this in modern witchcraft. I mean, there are many manifestations of this same thing through history.

And so the answer to me is actually not complicated. It's go and seek the truth that God is hidden in the world, seek to understand the world through the lawful means that he's appointed. Yeah. It's like, yeah, go and go and dig down and mine minerals and do experiments and try to make things and read the scriptures. And yeah, absolutely investigate truth through philosophical endeavor and theological study. But what we want to make sure is that we're submitting ourselves. to the scriptures at all times. Yeah.

That's the key thing missing is a submission to God's scriptures instead of in pride exalting ourselves and saying, well, the scriptures aren't sufficient for me to have the spiritual knowledge. I want to go and get more spiritual knowledge. Yeah. Because when you have that thought, which is a thought of arrogance and hubris, you quickly forget passages like when Paul tells us that even if an angel of light gives you a gospel contrary to this one, let him be accursed.

Yep. It's easy to let those things go by the wayside when you just want to gain more knowledge and suddenly you think that you are starting to get some. Yep. That's a very dangerous road to go down. Paul and you referenced Galatians 8-1. Even if we were an angel of heaven preaches a gospel contrary to the one that Paul preached, he said, let him be a cursed. And he warns the Corinthians and 2nd Corinthians 1114 that Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light. And so you have to understand as you're going out into the world, this embattled world that's, not just flesh and blood, but rulers and authorities and powers and principalities in the heavenly places, that you're going out into a world where you can easily be deceived. And so to me, the answer is, again, to go back where Paul, you know, Paul again says in the scriptures, what are you to do? Put on the full armor of God, the helmet of salvation, the belt of truth, shod your feet with the gospel of peace, take up the shield of faith, with which you'll extinguish the fiery darts of the enemy, the breastplate of right? The breastplate of righteousness. I mean, when you put on the full armor of God and believe God in faith,

then the fiery darts of the enemy, they're extinguished. Yeah. You resist the devil and he flees from you. Yeah. If you go out and you try to get the devil to give you some hidden knowledge of the universe, you might get some, but you might also, in the process, be destroyed. Yeah. In fact, you probably will. And we're hoping that this show can serve as a sort of sniff test for people. Train your noses. Because look at all these things, these people walk away with some sort of message. They're being evangelized to something. And it's always contrary to what the word says. So this is why we're saying that this is an attempt by those same old demons to just run a new play. Because the people are walking away thinking evolution must be true because I'm being told I have to

ascend to a higher plane. I'm learning that we have like this new status that we can reach as humans where we'll achieve power that's normal that seems right now like it would be divine. Yeah. So what we're going to close with tonight is an example that I believe is extremely modern of the beginning of this taking place. Now, I got to have a disclaimer and say that neither Brian nor I think that this is for sure. This is very speculative. But it's nonetheless an interesting case. And if you look at it from a certain perspective, it does kind of seem as though

were all being played. I think as a little like preliminary help to understand why we would talk about this topic as we're being mystic about it right now. Yeah. Is that you have to realize that there is no aspect of human life that is not claimed by Christ, that's not claimed by the false gods and counterclaimed by Christ. Yes. That the whole of the world, all of human existence is being, is under siege, is under attack.

So go ahead. Let's get to the least hinged since spirals. Since the spiral. Let's talk about the AI. Yes, let's talk about the AI, who you might know as lobe. As today's world becomes increasingly technocentric, the axiom of all nature being cursed comes under fire yet again. There's this new latent space and we must ask ourselves, is this curse too, even if it's just a supposed creation of man?

We've seen this tested and proven before in other things. Think of internal combustion engines, okay? They drive nearly every adult in the world to and from jobs and houses every day, at least in the developed world. Doubtless, it's a beautiful machine. It's the brainchild of man's seeking and finding some of those things that God and his glory has hidden away. But the best internal combustion engines can only have an efficiency of 45%.

45, that's a failing grade, by the way. Wow. That means that of all the energy you put into a combustion engine, it can only turn 45% of it into mechanical energy. If you contrast that with electric motors, theirs is much better, but they still can only achieve about 80%. That's still not very good. There's a lot lacking there. What about the inventions of man, though, that are less overtly mechanical? What about the cloud, the web, you know, this worldwide web?

Is there any explicit indication of the, curse present in the web that springs to mind. And I'm not talking about the depravity of its users. That's obvious even to the users. I mean, some quality within the building blocks of the latent space itself. Now, I would argue, yes, there are explicit signs of the curse carrying over into these ethers of information. I think, in fact, we have a modern example that transcends just a sprinkle of the curse here and there, but is actually rather loud in it being explicit. There is an entity emerging in the deep confines of AI generated art that smells evil to those who can pass a good sniff test. Think about artificial intelligence. Yes. Crazy. It has been called, quote, the first cryptid

of the latent space, which is a really cool title. What is a cryptid? A cryptid is a undocumented animal that people report seeing, but there's no, quote, scientific proof of it existing. I want to make sure we're not leaving behind our, are not crazy. Yes. The people that are good. They're good. And they're good. people that aren't like, oh, let's talk about, you know, whether the Bigfoot is an interdimensional being or not. Like, people have had those conversations. They're like, wait, what is Bigfoot? Yeah, and we're like, that's just a normal conversation. Anyway, just a normal Tuesday. People are saying this is the first cryptid. Yeah, they call this the first cryptid of the latent space. But what is the, can you, what is latent space? So the latent space is the, I think of it as the

cloud. Okay. So it's, it's the space that the servers around the world create. Okay. This internet web-based space that I also have called it the ether. Because frankly, I don't know how it works. Everything is stored in these servers, but it almost seems like this separate ethereal plane. It's not. It's not that. But that just is what it can be perceived by. So for example, you go to Walmart.com and you're looking for some communion cups for church. That is the latent space.

That is a latent space. Twitter is a latent space. Now, to one who has knowledge of cryptids and also egregors, this being, and we're getting there, this being seems more egregorish and less cryptid-e. Okay. Because it seems more dangerous, frankly. So you're saying, I'm not sorry to interrupt. No, no, no, don't be sorry.

But you're saying, I'm acting right now as the normie listener. Yes. And I'm just going to interrogate you a little bit. You're saying that you think in the artificial intelligence. data set. Yes. So all of the latent space, the data set that the artificial intelligence programs are reading and coming up with their...

Deep in its code. Deep in this AI's brain, so to speak. You can go in and say to the chat GPT thing right now, write me a poem in the style of John Keats about, you know, peanut butter sandwiches. It'll do it. It'll do it. Dolly, make me a painting in a Hudson River school style of blank, you know, whatever. The Titanic.

Of a guy named Ben sailing the Titanic and eating a peach. And it'll do it. So in that day. dataset lurking out there, you're telling me that you think that there is some sort of demonic power that is attempting to bend the artificial intelligence interpretation to deceive people. Yes. I'm here for it. Let's go. That to me is the more interesting idea. The less interesting idea, but it's still quite compelling, is that it's man's own fallenness and wickedness. Okay. That's baked into the AI's code.

And that makes sense too. That's true either way. Both can be true. Yeah. The first one is, or what I just said, is definitely true. There's curse there because it's only reading information that fallen humans have put in there. Yes, exactly. But you're saying there's something more.

So the reason that I'm saying that is because I was doing all this research and it just seemed like this event that took place, this lobe thing that happened. Okay. It was trying to deceive. It seemed like it was an attempt at deception. Now, it was an ugly attempt. Some might say clunky. Yeah. And we'll get into the details here.

just a moment. But it just looked like more than something strange that coincidentally happened. All right. It looked like more than just like the remnants of man's own sin present somewhere deep in this thing's code. Like it looked overtly malicious. Okay. And very, very deceptive. So again, the name of this thing, and you may have heard of it, is lobe. This lobe, L-O-A-B. L-O-A-B has been thought by some to perhaps be a manifested thought. thought form from humanity's fears and sins on the internet. Wow. That's now manifested.

Or, as I would say, maybe it's a rebellious watcher of the old world, proving that the latent space is anything but neutral. Just like the rest of creation, the latent space too is steeped in a battle of light versus darkness. In this case, though, the darkness has proved to be especially grotesque. Now, both Brian and I, I should say, have actually used this service, this AI generated art service because all this is focused on AI generated art. Brian and I have both used this.

We've used it to frankly make some pretty cool stuff. We don't believe that it's inherently evil. We just think that Christians ought to be bold enough to call something that quacks and waddles a duck. And I think that what we have here is a duck. And I think it'll help to first describe how this AI generated art actually is working. Because it's just magic to you. If you just go to one of these services and you type in your prompt or whatever, it will seem like magic that it's actually doing this.

But so for the user, it's not complicated at all. You just go in and for most of them, you type a prompt into the program window. Something detailed is better, like a Hudson River School style painting of Frodo Baggins eating ice cream with Sauron in the style of Winslow Homer. That would get you good results.

Sounds like a banger. By the way, Hudson River School is kind of a hack with this AI art. So then you press enter and you'll get a series of images, four or five images usually, that basically give you the AI's interpretation of the prompt that you just sent in. So the more explicit and detailed you are, the closer it will be. If you just type in something like a dark star eating a bright star, you'll get clip art. You'll get basically clip art that's actually not cool. So very simple for the user. But the mechanics of what's happening inside the AI is not simple at all.

all. The AI is using essentially a deep labyrinth of text recognition and machine learning to adapt and grow powerful with each new iteration. So the more you use it and the more they refine it, the more powerful it becomes. In the purest sense of the word, it does have the ability to learn and think and teach itself this skill that humans have given it this ability. but it does have this ability. It has a kind of machine learning. So in addition to the normal prompts, there's also something called negative prompt weight. So all this does is to tell the AI basically to give you an image that it believes is the exact opposite of what you typed in. So it's it's searching normally, it would be searching all of the space that it has, all of the text that it has input it as its kind of data set, all of the images and text descriptions in that. And

it would say, okay, this is the closest we think to what you've typed in. The negative prompt weight gives you the opposite, which you might think would be pretty fun. If by fun you mean potentially horrifying, then yes. Well, so the Twitter user named at Supercomposite was using this feature, having a good time, and it kind of accidentally stumbled upon a dark side to this AI art. She made a series of horrible discoveries, which we think has the potential to demonstrate,

some evil forces that may be present and shaping and manipulating this AI. So a supercomposite is apparently a Marlon Brando fan. Why not? Right. And so this is what happened. She was curious to find out what the AI thinks the opposite of Marlon Brando is. Naturally. It's a good question.

As one does. So she prompted the AI with Brando colon colon, colon, negative one. And that colon, colon, negative one is a message to the AI to do the negative weight prompt. what she got back was, I mean, it was weird, and it was like really modern art-esque, but it wasn't horrifying. It was just the city skyline at night with these random letters that kind of spelled out the words Digitapintix written into the buildings. Nothing crazy.

I mean, it's something that you might see on a ska band album cover. Yeah, maybe. It's weird. Yeah, weird, but whatever. Like most curious users, though, she was like, well, hey, let's see if I type Digitapentix skyline logo, colon, colon, negative one into the prompt, will I get Marlon Brando? That's the A. Very interesting question.

Fair question. Yeah. Okay, so that's what she did. She typed that in. And what she got was, I'll say not Marlon Brando. Not Marlon Brando. It was pretty unexpected instead of that great star from streetcar named Desire, which is not a good movie, by the way. The AI gave her a set of pictures whose focal point was this grossly disfigure.

your woman with an expression on her face ranging from utter to spare to this almost unsettling serenity. You know, like when you have a baby doll with the weird face, it's smiling, and if you open your eyes in the middle of the night and see it, you're looking at you. So it was that creepy. And then it was also like a despairing face. One of these pictures actually depicted this ghastly woman on the cover of a music album, supposedly, in the album's title was in this weird language, but one of the words was lobe. So it kind of, this woman colloquially became known as lobe. Lobe L-O-A-B. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and it's not Loab. It's Loeb. No, lobe. Now, initially, this was only unsettling and alarming because of how gross the features on this thing looked like. But at Supercomposite

found pretty quickly that this wasn't just a single accident of the algorithm, that there was more going on here, that this thing seemed to haunt some of these spaces in the AI. She started to combine the image of Loeb with other completely unrelated images and asked the AI to create more images based on the merging of the two. And she described what followed like this. She said, quote, through some kind of emergent statistical, accident, something about this woman is adjacent to extremely gory and macabre imagery in the distribution of the AI's world knowledge. Image after image returned from a myriad of prompts, all of them saturated with the most violent and disturbing scenes even a human mind could conceive of,

let alone a computer. At the root of all of them, the features and face of lobe is clearly distinguished. This thing, as I'm certainly slow to actually call it an entity of some kind, permeates and dominates every scene it is paired with to create maximum depravity. I cannot stress this enough. Those with weak stomachs should absolutely not seek these images out. Even those who can handle them will be undoubtedly disturbed. Probably just nobody should see. Nobody should see them. They're not good. And the thing is, the AI is actually most of these programs are designed to have a governor on them. Yeah.

It prevents you from trying to get it to do like murder images or like bad stuff. Yeah. But somehow this was slipping through. Yeah, it didn't work with this. So she continues. When Loeb was combined with a quite beautiful and surreal image of a glass tunnel surrounded by angels in the style of Wes Anderson, the level and gore and complete hatred of the human likeness was displayed prominently.

Loeb apparently is the great corruptor. of the beauty that AI art is capable of. Yeah, and what's most striking in all of this isn't necessarily the propagation of lobe to other users. That's the thing is a lot of people read this Twitter thread from Supercomposite and thought, oh, this is happening to everybody. Like everyone's seeing Loeb. That's not what happened.

This only happened to Supercomposite. And as far as I know, until she shared it with Twitter, it hadn't happened to anyone else, at least not to the degree that it happened to her. The horror here is twofold, though. Okay, so since Supercomposite has shared her story, hundreds of thousands of people are now seeking out these images of Loeb, using her as a prompt to generate more images of Loeb,

and they're becoming genuinely afraid of it. And they're becoming afraid of AI in general. Loeb has gained, from some, almost a cult-like fan base, heralded as a cryptid worthy of awe. You know how people get excited about Bigfoot. Yeah. They were like, oh, yeah, I'm a squatchy. I don't know if people say that.

I don't know if people say that either. They should. This is kind of happening. Yeah. The difference is that this is like disgusting. Yeah. Okay, these images are gross. And we shouldn't be, I think, we shouldn't be as lighthearted about it.

Yeah. It's borderline praise for something that's really clearly ugly in a fallen world where no neutrality exists. So it's, at the very least, it's dangerous. Beyond this, the images returned tended to graphically depict the horrific. the horrific disfigurement and mutilation of human beings. So this goes back to there being some seed in the AI's code or something that makes it possible at least for them to hate the image of God. That's the implication.

We're not going to be so bold as to claim with certainty that these things are the obvious work of the Egregore, of the watchers, the demonic powers manipulating AI. But often it proves out that once you see something, somewhere, you begin to see it everywhere. Once you see these patterns of demonic influence in history, ancient and malevolent beings bent on destroying God's image bearers and waging war on his throne, you start to see that everywhere, to see how truly pervasive it is. So Christians, the exhortation is to be on guard. Set a watch. Set a watch even if that watch is over the walls

of the latent internet space. Did you know that patrons get access to bonus stories that didn't make it into the main episode, as well as early access to half of the season of Haunted Cosmos at a time. Support the show and get access to all kinds of great perks at patreon.com slash haunted cosmos. Want more haunted cosmos? Then make your way over to Patreon, where you can get early access to our content as well as exclusive content in regular dusty tomes and monthly live streams with Brian and myself. So go to patreon.com slash haunted cosmos and sign up now.