Feb. 8: The devil's footprints
If you're going to be a Christian, you have to believe in the devil.
The whole faith doesn't make sense if you don't. Also, after you read
the account of Christ's temptation in the desert, you'd have to come to
the conclusion that Jesus was schizophrenic.
*
When I was about 10, we summoned the devil in a seance in my parents' garage. I am not making this up. I have to say that here because when I tell this story, people inevitably ask if I'm making it up. I'm not.
The seance was being led by my best friend, who is now dead. He drew a pentagram on the floor and chanted some weird stuff and then he summoned old Ned himself. He had us all carry holy relics so we could betray the devil. At one point, he asked Satan to give a sign of his presence.
The light bulbs in the garage flickered for a second. Just a second. But they flickered.
One of the older kids yelled "I'm outta here" and beat it. I stayed though. I can't explain why. I believed in a personal devil and I still do, I suppose. Maybe it was just the holy relic I was holding made me feel safe.
I don't tell that story very often. Probably the reason is there's the temptation to tell it in a lighthearted manner even though it's a subject I don't treat lightly at all. Curiously, I tell it most often when I am discussing my faith with atheists. I remember telling it to a guy named Nick, who was married to the proofreader of a newspaper where I worked. Nick was not just an atheist, he was also a materialist (by this I mean that he believed the only thing that exists is matter, not that his whole lifestyle revolves around making money and buying stupid things with it.) I told him the story of the day we summoned the devil in my garage. Nick didn't think I was lying. No atheist I've told that story to has ever accused me of lying. But no atheist has ever accepted Jesus because of it either.
Nick asked me some questions about the wiring in the garage and if anyone had tampered with it. I said no on both accounts. We were 10 years old and we hadn't been planning on doing the seance, it just sort of happened. I didn't think my best friend could have hacked into the fusebox so he could perform his demonic deception.
And so Nick concluded that it was a coincidence. I don't fault him for that. I don't. It's a perfectly logical conclusion and it's far from being the most amazing coincidence I've ever heard of. On a planet where literally billions of things happen everyday, some of them will be bound to circumstances that make them seem miraculous.
Full disclosure: I have interviewed some of the people who were in the garage that day. One of them lives in Texas. He remembers the event but never thinks about it. When I forced him to think about it, he had no epiphanies; it did not change his worldview. He told me he didn't believe in anything supernatural and that he had taken the position that human beings are on their own.
I guess the moral here is that just because you meet Satan in a suburban garage in southwest Calgary, you're not necessarily going to become Billy Graham.
But I'll tell you one thing, my friends. I sensed an alien presence in that garage that afternoon and I have never felt fully comfortable going back in there.
*
In Grade 10, Geraldo Rivera did this TV special where he was talking about the plague of devil worship in America. I watched it and it freaked me out. A close neighbour had watched it too and warned me not to fraternize with devil worshippers. "They will take you into their house and they will brainwash you and you will become a devil worshipper too," she warned.
And I always thought Jesus said He had overcome the world. If devil worshippers could turn me into one of them just by offering me a chocolate bar then Jesus probably wasn't doing his job.
Anyway, the next day at school, Mrs. English spent the entire social studies class talking about Geraldo's devil worship TV show - evidently it had affected her quite a bit. One girl said that she once got scared to death using a Ouija board at her girlfriend's house. One guy named Geoff assured us that Slayer didn't really worship the devil or sacrifice babies to Satan - it was just their gimmick.
I bought into the Geraldo shit hook line and sinker and I was a little embarrassed a few years later when someone told me, then showed me, how the whole thing was just overhyped yellow journalism. Yes there was a pentagram spray painted on a church somewhere but what does Mr. Common Sense say about that? Was the perpretator more likely to be (a) a bored teenager wanted to get a reaction from the stuffed collars at St. Mary's or (b) baby-sacrificing goat's blood drinking Satan worshippers who are sending a message to everyone in the congregation that Charlie Manson's brood of vipers will personally slit their throats?
*
My dad used to work for a radio evangelist named Bob Larson, who used to travel the country doing exorcisms in hotel ballrooms and lecturing about the evils of rock music. My dad's job was to try to get local radio stations to buy Bob Larson's radio show. This was probably the shittiest point of my dad's professional career. He once told me he had a job where had to pick up big chunks of coal and then throw them at the ground really hard so that they shattered into a bunch of smaller pieces. Despite the sore back and dirty hands, I bet he liked that job ten times more than having to sell Bob Larson's snake oil.
I listened to one of Bob Larson's shows once. Even though I was only 18, I was still able to do a brief synopsis of the typical Bob Larson show:
- 85 per cent of the show is Bob Larson asking for money. Either $126.06 or $252.12. Apparently these two amounts would allow him to save one or two stations.
- 12 per cent of the show were pitches to buy Bob Larson's novel, Dead Air - which was about a talk show host being plagued by demons.
- 3 per cent was Bob taking actual phone calls. He counseled a teenaged girl who said she loved the band, the Cure. On another show, he yelled at a woman who said she enjoyed doing drugs and sleeping around and that she didn't believe in God.
*
Bob Larson is still in business.
On his website, he has a link for his special school of exorcism where you can learn to be a master level exorcist for $2,500. If memory serves, this is $2,500 more than what Jesus charged his disciples.
Oh yeah. The website also says that Bob Larson is the world's "foremost expert on the cults, the occult and supernatural phenomena."
No, he's not.
This dude does exorcisms via Skype.
*
Bob Larson came to Calgary once. I went to see him. He was doing an exorcism at the Sheraton Hotel. We were ushered into a dark room. Someone wheeled in a TV set. The TV showed Bob Larson on Larry King and on Politically Incorrect, where he talked about his work as an exorcist. Then Bob came out and showed us videos of him interviewing demon possessed people.
One video was from a session in Houston. The demon possessed lady he was interviewing said she got that way by "baby blood" - which meant killing babies. During the break, I got on a pay phone and contacted the homicide department of Houston's police department and asked if they had any unsolved murdered baby cases. They said they did not. I wanted to confront Bob Larson with this evidence but I wasn't allowed to. Bob finished his shpiel and then invited us to buy his books and videos, which he'd brought with him.
*
A girl I once dated claimed to be a Satanist.
I can't possibly follow that.
*
I have been accused of being in league with the devil. This is a professional hazard that all magicians face.
I've been doing magic for almost 30 years and in that time, I have only run into three groups of Christians that believed I was in league with the devil.
The first two were when I was still a teenager. I was 18 and working at a restaurant called Curly's. It was Sunday brunch and I approached a table with one old man and two middle-aged women.
"Would you like to see some magic?" I asked.
"No," said the old man. "And I'll tell you why... it's because I have a best friend named Jesus Christ."
He told me that Deuteronomy forbade witchcraft. I tried to tell him that I wasn't into witchcraft, just sleight of hand. One of the women said: "Yeah but when you get into drugs you don't start with cocaine. You'll start with something light like marijuana and then work your way up."
I tried arguing with them for a bit. I told them I was a Christian and they assured me that I was not. "Jesus has the power to set you free," the man kept saying.
You know... I guess I'm painting an ugly picture of those three folks, but they weren't rude at all. They seemed like genuine people who wanted to save my soul, even though I believed, and still believe, that my soul IS saved. In the end, I wished them well and the man smiled and said "the Lord bless you anyway."
The second encounter happened about a year later when I was doing magic at the Blackfoot Inn in Calgary. An extended family came in and commandeered an entire table in the back room. They were dressed in their Sunday best. I think the kids may have even had those Bible colouring books you can get in Sunday School.
Anyway, I started doing magic in the other room. At one point, one of the men from the back room came up to me, grabbed my arm, and pulled me to the side.
"I see you're doing magic tricks," he said. He was not smiling.
"Yes sir."
"Well, I just want you to know that you are not welcome at our table. Please do not come near us at all."
"Okay," I said.
He turned and walked away. I did my best to avoid the table but I remember one of the little kids wanting to see some magic and his mother told him he couldn't.
I didn't have another encounter with Christians for 18 years, though I imagine I'd performed for thousands of them in that time. The third time a Christian challenged me on it was barely a year ago. She's the cousin of a friend of mine and we were having a conversation on my friend's couch.
She was very kind. Very sweet. Cared for me and my soul. She understood that there is a difference between sleight of hand and witchcraft; her concern was that I could be misleading some people.
"Some people don't understand the difference," she said. "You should know that your magic could be leading people astray."
I said that I thought the odds of that happening are virtually zero. "If people believed I had actual magic powers, my phone would be ringing off the hook," I said. "People would want me to turn water into gasoline or rocks into gold."
She actually agreed that was true. But I still don't think she'll come see my magic show.
*
I have never owned a Ouija board. I won't allow one in my house.
I used to have a deck of Tarot cards, which I used to do magic tricks. I've since thrown it away too. Having it in my house gave me the heebie-jeebies.
I believe Satan exists.
i wonder if his footprints are in that old garage.
*
When I was about 10, we summoned the devil in a seance in my parents' garage. I am not making this up. I have to say that here because when I tell this story, people inevitably ask if I'm making it up. I'm not.
The seance was being led by my best friend, who is now dead. He drew a pentagram on the floor and chanted some weird stuff and then he summoned old Ned himself. He had us all carry holy relics so we could betray the devil. At one point, he asked Satan to give a sign of his presence.
The light bulbs in the garage flickered for a second. Just a second. But they flickered.
One of the older kids yelled "I'm outta here" and beat it. I stayed though. I can't explain why. I believed in a personal devil and I still do, I suppose. Maybe it was just the holy relic I was holding made me feel safe.
I don't tell that story very often. Probably the reason is there's the temptation to tell it in a lighthearted manner even though it's a subject I don't treat lightly at all. Curiously, I tell it most often when I am discussing my faith with atheists. I remember telling it to a guy named Nick, who was married to the proofreader of a newspaper where I worked. Nick was not just an atheist, he was also a materialist (by this I mean that he believed the only thing that exists is matter, not that his whole lifestyle revolves around making money and buying stupid things with it.) I told him the story of the day we summoned the devil in my garage. Nick didn't think I was lying. No atheist I've told that story to has ever accused me of lying. But no atheist has ever accepted Jesus because of it either.
Nick asked me some questions about the wiring in the garage and if anyone had tampered with it. I said no on both accounts. We were 10 years old and we hadn't been planning on doing the seance, it just sort of happened. I didn't think my best friend could have hacked into the fusebox so he could perform his demonic deception.
And so Nick concluded that it was a coincidence. I don't fault him for that. I don't. It's a perfectly logical conclusion and it's far from being the most amazing coincidence I've ever heard of. On a planet where literally billions of things happen everyday, some of them will be bound to circumstances that make them seem miraculous.
Full disclosure: I have interviewed some of the people who were in the garage that day. One of them lives in Texas. He remembers the event but never thinks about it. When I forced him to think about it, he had no epiphanies; it did not change his worldview. He told me he didn't believe in anything supernatural and that he had taken the position that human beings are on their own.
I guess the moral here is that just because you meet Satan in a suburban garage in southwest Calgary, you're not necessarily going to become Billy Graham.
But I'll tell you one thing, my friends. I sensed an alien presence in that garage that afternoon and I have never felt fully comfortable going back in there.
*
In Grade 10, Geraldo Rivera did this TV special where he was talking about the plague of devil worship in America. I watched it and it freaked me out. A close neighbour had watched it too and warned me not to fraternize with devil worshippers. "They will take you into their house and they will brainwash you and you will become a devil worshipper too," she warned.
And I always thought Jesus said He had overcome the world. If devil worshippers could turn me into one of them just by offering me a chocolate bar then Jesus probably wasn't doing his job.
Anyway, the next day at school, Mrs. English spent the entire social studies class talking about Geraldo's devil worship TV show - evidently it had affected her quite a bit. One girl said that she once got scared to death using a Ouija board at her girlfriend's house. One guy named Geoff assured us that Slayer didn't really worship the devil or sacrifice babies to Satan - it was just their gimmick.
I bought into the Geraldo shit hook line and sinker and I was a little embarrassed a few years later when someone told me, then showed me, how the whole thing was just overhyped yellow journalism. Yes there was a pentagram spray painted on a church somewhere but what does Mr. Common Sense say about that? Was the perpretator more likely to be (a) a bored teenager wanted to get a reaction from the stuffed collars at St. Mary's or (b) baby-sacrificing goat's blood drinking Satan worshippers who are sending a message to everyone in the congregation that Charlie Manson's brood of vipers will personally slit their throats?
*
My dad used to work for a radio evangelist named Bob Larson, who used to travel the country doing exorcisms in hotel ballrooms and lecturing about the evils of rock music. My dad's job was to try to get local radio stations to buy Bob Larson's radio show. This was probably the shittiest point of my dad's professional career. He once told me he had a job where had to pick up big chunks of coal and then throw them at the ground really hard so that they shattered into a bunch of smaller pieces. Despite the sore back and dirty hands, I bet he liked that job ten times more than having to sell Bob Larson's snake oil.
I listened to one of Bob Larson's shows once. Even though I was only 18, I was still able to do a brief synopsis of the typical Bob Larson show:
- 85 per cent of the show is Bob Larson asking for money. Either $126.06 or $252.12. Apparently these two amounts would allow him to save one or two stations.
- 12 per cent of the show were pitches to buy Bob Larson's novel, Dead Air - which was about a talk show host being plagued by demons.
- 3 per cent was Bob taking actual phone calls. He counseled a teenaged girl who said she loved the band, the Cure. On another show, he yelled at a woman who said she enjoyed doing drugs and sleeping around and that she didn't believe in God.
*
Bob Larson is still in business.
On his website, he has a link for his special school of exorcism where you can learn to be a master level exorcist for $2,500. If memory serves, this is $2,500 more than what Jesus charged his disciples.
Oh yeah. The website also says that Bob Larson is the world's "foremost expert on the cults, the occult and supernatural phenomena."
No, he's not.
This dude does exorcisms via Skype.
*
Bob Larson came to Calgary once. I went to see him. He was doing an exorcism at the Sheraton Hotel. We were ushered into a dark room. Someone wheeled in a TV set. The TV showed Bob Larson on Larry King and on Politically Incorrect, where he talked about his work as an exorcist. Then Bob came out and showed us videos of him interviewing demon possessed people.
One video was from a session in Houston. The demon possessed lady he was interviewing said she got that way by "baby blood" - which meant killing babies. During the break, I got on a pay phone and contacted the homicide department of Houston's police department and asked if they had any unsolved murdered baby cases. They said they did not. I wanted to confront Bob Larson with this evidence but I wasn't allowed to. Bob finished his shpiel and then invited us to buy his books and videos, which he'd brought with him.
*
A girl I once dated claimed to be a Satanist.
I can't possibly follow that.
*
I have been accused of being in league with the devil. This is a professional hazard that all magicians face.
I've been doing magic for almost 30 years and in that time, I have only run into three groups of Christians that believed I was in league with the devil.
The first two were when I was still a teenager. I was 18 and working at a restaurant called Curly's. It was Sunday brunch and I approached a table with one old man and two middle-aged women.
"Would you like to see some magic?" I asked.
"No," said the old man. "And I'll tell you why... it's because I have a best friend named Jesus Christ."
He told me that Deuteronomy forbade witchcraft. I tried to tell him that I wasn't into witchcraft, just sleight of hand. One of the women said: "Yeah but when you get into drugs you don't start with cocaine. You'll start with something light like marijuana and then work your way up."
I tried arguing with them for a bit. I told them I was a Christian and they assured me that I was not. "Jesus has the power to set you free," the man kept saying.
You know... I guess I'm painting an ugly picture of those three folks, but they weren't rude at all. They seemed like genuine people who wanted to save my soul, even though I believed, and still believe, that my soul IS saved. In the end, I wished them well and the man smiled and said "the Lord bless you anyway."
The second encounter happened about a year later when I was doing magic at the Blackfoot Inn in Calgary. An extended family came in and commandeered an entire table in the back room. They were dressed in their Sunday best. I think the kids may have even had those Bible colouring books you can get in Sunday School.
Anyway, I started doing magic in the other room. At one point, one of the men from the back room came up to me, grabbed my arm, and pulled me to the side.
"I see you're doing magic tricks," he said. He was not smiling.
"Yes sir."
"Well, I just want you to know that you are not welcome at our table. Please do not come near us at all."
"Okay," I said.
He turned and walked away. I did my best to avoid the table but I remember one of the little kids wanting to see some magic and his mother told him he couldn't.
I didn't have another encounter with Christians for 18 years, though I imagine I'd performed for thousands of them in that time. The third time a Christian challenged me on it was barely a year ago. She's the cousin of a friend of mine and we were having a conversation on my friend's couch.
She was very kind. Very sweet. Cared for me and my soul. She understood that there is a difference between sleight of hand and witchcraft; her concern was that I could be misleading some people.
"Some people don't understand the difference," she said. "You should know that your magic could be leading people astray."
I said that I thought the odds of that happening are virtually zero. "If people believed I had actual magic powers, my phone would be ringing off the hook," I said. "People would want me to turn water into gasoline or rocks into gold."
She actually agreed that was true. But I still don't think she'll come see my magic show.
*
I have never owned a Ouija board. I won't allow one in my house.
I used to have a deck of Tarot cards, which I used to do magic tricks. I've since thrown it away too. Having it in my house gave me the heebie-jeebies.
I believe Satan exists.
i wonder if his footprints are in that old garage.
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