The Spirits' Book

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Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s a good question! I know you asked that to Fr. Stephen, but could I just begin to take a shot at this, if you don’t mind? The Angel of the Lord is mentioned dozens of times in the Holy Scriptures, yet the identity and nature of this figure is fuzzy for many Christians. Is he an… Fr. Andrew: He’s judging the gods of Egypt. So is God rendering judgment to made-up characters that the Egyptian pagans are worshiping? The text doesn’t say that. It doesn’t say they’re fake. It doesn’t say that they don’t exist. We will get into in the New Testament later. Most of the stuff we’re reading from the Old, but we’re showing… If you look at the Scriptures, folks, closely, you’ll see that the Scriptures are taking these things very seriously and not saying this is some kind of metaphor or again made-up stories. Fr. Stephen: Whoops, we left all this polytheistic stuff in there. Our bad! So that’s a problem. And then the other thing to me that really blows it out of the water is that the plural form of “gods,” talking about “gods” in the plural, is actually more common in the Dead Sea Scrolls than it is in the Old Testament. And the Dead Sea Scrolls are written right before and during the time of Christ. They clearly hadn’t evolved in their language; they were still talking about a plurality of gods.

The Spirits’ Book - Allan Kardec

One of the problems with the way the modern world tends to look at ancient religion is they’ll say, “Well, they notice that there’s lightning in the sky or they notice that there’s earthquakes or they notice that the Nile floods, so they came up with some kind of explanation for it, and eventually that explanation evolved into believing in some kind of god of lightning or whatever.” No, that’s not the way that the Bible depicts this stuff, and it’s not the way that the people on the ground understood what they were doing. They attest to the fact that they had encounters with these spiritual beings, and the Bible takes them very, very seriously. Again, God standing in the midst of the gods, God judging gods. It’s lots of places. I know we’ve got some more. Okay, let’s talk about a couple more here, because we do want to take some calls. Fr. Stephen: We’ll see. I am not to “um, actually” you. Go ahead. Now that I put that tension out there. Find sources: "The Spirits Book"– news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR ( April 2014) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Fr. Andrew: That’s one of the reasons why, in the description for this show, I wanted to especially use that phrase, “the union of the seen and the unseen.” We’re not just talking about— This is not just a show about ghosts. [Laughter] It’s not like: “Here’s how to deal with your haunted house,” although I’m sure, I hope we get at least one caller and says that his house is haunted and what do you do about that, because there is something to do, actually. One last note on this question—hopefully that’s thorough enough—one last note on this question, because I think it’s important. What we mean when we say that there is one true God, what it means to be a true God, because I think what we hear as modern American Christians, when you hear “true God” is: “Oh, he’s the one that exists, and the other ones are fake.”And now the one that will be most controversial, that I kind of warned you about, but we’re going to go there. [Laughter] This is in Exodus 21:1-6, which is in the context of laws governing slavery—so not controversial at all, this passage in the Torah. This particular rule that’s being made in the first six verses of Exodus [21] is for a situation where someone has been in a period of indentured servitude, so they’ve been working for and part of a household for some period of time to pay off a debt. They come to the end of their term of service, but they like the household and the family and they want to stay on. There were strict rules about how long you could keep someone in slavery and all of these things that are outlined in the rest of the chapter. If a person voluntarily says, “I rather like being the tutor or nanny for your children and I want to stay. I feel like I’m part of the family,” there was a provision to do that. Fr. Andrew: Thank you very much for that call, Gareth. Next we have Michael who is in Arkansas, and Michael has a question or a comment about polytheism versus monotheism. Michael, are you there? Fr. Stephen: So that’s why we’re going to talk about these kind of things. It’s not because we’re trying to shake anybody up or be firebrands or cause controversy. A newly introduced main character in The Labyrinth of the Spirits, Alicia, a police agent in the fascist era, is explicitly a Spanish version of Lewis Carroll’s Alice, who, just as typically, was also the inspiration for Ariadne, the protagonist of the eight lost Mataix novels. But Alicia is also compared to Cinderella; she has, like two of the women in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (a favourite Zafón text) a physical disability; and, consciously or unconsciously, also seems to incorporate elements of Lisbeth Salander in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series. Congruent, validated answers were eventually compiled and organized into what become known as “The Spirits’ Book”. “The Spirits’ Book” was first published on April 18, 1857 containing 501 questions and answers. The second edition was published in 1860 and contained 1,018 — a testament to the ever-growing, ever-learning nature of Spiritism. The third edition — considered final and the one we use today — included minor revisions and numbered one more question to end at the total of 1,019 we know today. As an educator, Kardec also understood the importance of primary sources and thus chose to reproduce the answers from the spiritis verbatim, avoiding editorializing unless greater context would help. Finally, Kardec organized The Spirits’ Book into four parts to facilitate understanding: 1) Primary Causes; 2) The Spirit World; 3) Moral Laws; and 4) Hopes and Solaces.The result is an impactful work which begs the reader to reach its own conclusions about the facts presented. Spiritism After The Spirits’ Book

The Complete Book of Spirits - Google Books The Complete Book of Spirits - Google Books

The next to last entry, " Oberyon," shifts the focus from demons to fairies. After the eighty-one demons, the book details Mycob (wife of Oberyon) and their seven daughters. [11] It then repeats the four kings of the air, listing twelve demons under each of them. [12] After this, it begins describing the spirits of the days of the week and the incenses and conjurations needed to summon them, lifting material from The Sworn Book of Honorius and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy. [13] It follows with a list of Greek and Roman gods, a note about which spirits rule hell, and an entry to summon spirits "that make books and write books," [14] before giving instructions on how to summon the angel over each day of the week, including instructions for magic circles, consecrations, use of holy water and exorcisms of fire. This portion uses elements of scripture, Sarum Missal, the Key of Solomon, Arbatel, Honorius, Agrippa, Raziel, and what would become the Tridentine Mass. It also shares some prayers found in the Munich Manual of Demonic Magic. [15]Amid the game-playing with known and unknown stories, Zafón has a serious and angry political intent. The sections of The Labyrinth of the Spirits are named after the parts of the Roman Catholic church’s Latin requiem – Dies Irae, Libera Me, etc – which underlines the suggestion that the novels are a lamentation for Spanish (and especially Catalan) history. Zafón is a fine describer of city sights, vividly depicting both the touristic and obscure parts of Barcelona and Madrid I don’t know. That’s a much longer way of saying what my motivation is for doing this, but I think it’s important for us to lay this stuff out at the beginning so that people get the idea. This is not a couple of professors teaching a class in demonology or angelology or any of that kind of stuff; that’s not what’s going on. But obviously we’re going to be touching on a lot of those kinds of topics. Is there anything else, though, Father, that you wanted to add in terms of laying out what it is we’re trying to accomplish with this particular show? Fr. Stephen: And so these spiritual beings can be called gods—in English we’d do it with a small g, but they aren’t using capitals in Greek—can be talked about that way, because either, on the one side, God has chosen to share his rule and his dominion with them, and so with angelic beings they are sharing in and reigning with God, and God is exercising his rule and his dominion and his power and his authority through them, graciously sharing it with them; or on the other side, on the more demonic side, because humans in their rebellion and sin have elevated these spiritual beings and have chosen to worship and serve them and become enslaved to them, so they are functioning as gods in that sense. Fr. Stephen: I’m going to court a low-grade controversy by saying the rubber met the road with this recently with a lot of people, even in our Orthodox circles, where, when the pandemic started and people were saying, “Okay, we need to take reasonable precautions; we need to be in obedience to our bishops and the civil government, but we also need prayer, incense…” In Orthodox countries, people are going out with holy water in the streets. A lot of our Christian brothers and sisters in the United States were like: “Okay, guys, this is serious. This is a disease. This is real,” in response. Like: “Yeah, all that stuff’s fun on Sunday morning, but this is a serious situation: people are dying.” Kardec (2019) A biographical feature film depicting how The Spirits' Book and other books were published.

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

Axis Mundi: The Book of Spirits is a sourcebook detailing many of the myriad spirits serving Gaia. Here are the elementals, Enigmatics, Epiphlings, Naturae, and the broods of the great Tribal Totems themselves. Can you afford not to seek their favor? Chapter 9 (Intervention of Spirits in the Material World) is about situations in which the spirits of the dead may, ostensibly or not, intentionally or not, have any form of influence on events of the living world. Fr. Stephen:“Lord of Spirits” is one of several titles that’s ascribed to God in the Enochic literature, which is the various books of Enoch as well as other books like the Apocalypse of Abraham and the Book of Jubilees and a few other texts in the Dead Sea Scrolls. “Lord of Spirits” is mostly used in the second portion of 1 Enoch, or the Book of Enoch, which is called the Book of Parables. The reason it’s used there is that it’s a title for God that describes his relationship with the other spiritual beings whom he created. It’s a way of referring to God in relationship to the heavenly hosts, the divine council, some of these other concepts that we’re going to be talking about a lot, not only in this episode, but in a bunch of episodes, and I’m sure in people’s questions. Fr. Andrew: You don’t want to be. You don’t want to be superstitious. That’s not the same. We’re not teaching people how to be superstitious well. [Laughter] That’s not what we’re doing.Raphael: Right on. Thank you, Fathers. First of all, congratulations on the episode. I am blown away so far. And, as we read Zafón’s novel, his characters are reading hundreds more, real and imagined. The quartet’s umbrella title, The Cemetery of Forgotten Books, refers to a focal location: a secret labyrinthine library in Barcelona, where cherished and threatened texts are protected, and from which visitors are allowed to take away one title. Expanded information on dealing with spirits, especially how to placate them and bind them into fetishes