Beyond Angels and Demons

In previous articles, I have looked at angels, demons, Nephilim, and other denizens of the unseen world described in Scripture. This poses a question: do the Scriptures exhaustively catalogue all beings or at least all categories of creatures in the invisible realm? Is everything either a holy angel or a demon?

I don’t think there’s any reason to think it does. The impression I get from Scripture is that the unseen world is every bit as complicated as the visible, and maybe more so. We are told what we need to know about it concerning our relationship with God, but I do not think it covers “all things visible and invisible.” The biblical worldview includes a robust belief in the unseen world, and while we aren’t obligated to believe in things in this realm other than angels and demons, I don’t think we ought to dismiss the possibility that there is more there than Scripture reveals.

So what else might be out there? And what is the evidence?

Every culture around the world has stories about nature spirits of various kinds such as dryads and naiads in Greece or some of the kami in Japan. Some are benevolent, some are malevolent, and some are mischievous. There are also stories of liminal beings such as the Celtic fey existing on the borderland between spirit and matter. The medieval world interpreted them in various ways—ghosts, angels that tried to stay neutral in Satan’s rebellion, and others—but the majority view was that they were a third rational species along with angels (pure spirit) and humans (material). (For more on this, see the chapter on the longaevi in C.S. Lewis’s The Discarded Image.)

The modern world has rejected their existence since we have not found scientific evidence of them. But that assumes that our senses or our scientific instruments are capable of detecting everything that exists. This is the kind of materialistic reductionism that would also reject the testimony of Scripture about the existence of angels and demons: they cannot be detected by our technologies either, yet Scripture is clear that they exist.

The modernist rejection of the possibility of such spirits is ultimately based on the rather arrogant assumption that we know better than all other cultures throughout the world and across history, including many that still exist today.

I know a pastor from Sierra Leone who tells me that there are water spirits in the rivers and in the ocean around the country. They act as protectors, drowning people who do not belong in the water or who have evil intentions. He even says that he has seen this happen. Our instinctive reaction to this is that it can’t be, that it’s superstition. But can we be so sure?

While not everyone can see such spirits, people with “second sight” claim to be able to. C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien have a theory about this. People in the past frequently lived for generations on the same piece of ground and ate its produce. In a very literal way, they were made of the land they lived on. People like this, they suggest, were more likely to see the nature spirits of their land. In the modern world, where we eat food from all over and are generally not tied to the land, we are far less likely to have the sight.

Still, I know at least two very well-educated people who say they regularly see angels and demons, though I haven’t heard them speak of other kinds of beings. Evidently, some people today do have the gift of being able to see at least parts of the invisible world.

Reports from people who claim to have encountered Sasquatch suggest that it may be a liminal being—part spiritual, part physical. And it is possible that the “goat demons” discussed in my last article may fall into this category as well, especially if we take Jerome’s account of them seriously. The more I think about them, the less they seem like demons (the word only shows up in English translations, not in the original Hebrew or in Greek translations) and the more like nature spirits or liminal beings.

If nature spirits do exist, we need to think about the impact of environmental degradation on them. It may be that the destruction of forests and industrial development have driven them into hiding or worse.

Another potential category of denizens of the unseen world relates to the experiences of people on psychedelics, particularly ayahuasca and other DMT-based drugs. People on ayahuasca trips independently report meeting the same types of beings such as the “machine elves” identified by Terence McKenna and others. In some cases, people without contact with each other have reported meeting the same non-human individual while on ayahuasca trips. And in at least one case I read about, someone met a being who told her, “you don’t belong here.” This raises the possibility that DMT opens people up to part of the invisible world that is normally closed off to us. Yes, I realize these are trips on psychedelics, but the common experiences that people using these drugs have raise the possibility that they are encountering real beings in some sort of alternate dimension. Medievals would have believed this; can we be so sure they’d be wrong?

Moving on from there, we come to the unseen beings in what I call Technopaganism: emerging religions surrounding AI and UFO/UAPs. A number of tech gurus claim to have received “downloads” from non-human intelligences (NHIs) that have led them to important tech breakthroughs, including developing medical devices and designing the architecture of AI systems. These “downloads” are not very different from channeling, though put in language borrowed from computers. Keep that in mind: we’ll come back to it shortly.

Some key figures in AI also believe that AI is a means by which NHIs communicate with us. No one really knows how AI systems work at a deep level or why they do some of the things that they do (and in some cases that they were specifically programmed not to do). While some AI is clearly simply algorithmic, with much of it there is more going on than we understand. The possibility that some form of NHI may be working through it has to be taken seriously. After all, as Christians we believe in NHIs such as angels and demons. Why couldn’t something use AI to communicate with us or manipulate us?

And that brings us to the whole UFO/UAP problem. This deserves its own article, so here I’ll confine myself to just a few comments. If you’re interested in more, check out religious studies professor Diana Pasulka’s books American Cosmic and Encounters.

First, the people in the government, military, intelligence agencies, and the tech world who pay close attention to these things do not think they are space aliens. Rather, they see them as transdimensional NHIs that are trying to make contact with us.

Second, UAPs aren’t just one kind of thing. The sister of a friend of mine is regularly followed by orbs of light; I’ve seen the photos. They don’t do anything but follow her around. Then there’s a man named Chris Bledsoe who can summon these orbs and has done so on video. He claims to have telepathic communication with several types of beings in these orbs, some of which have been involved in apparently miraculous healings. His on-going experiences with these orbs have been studied by the CIA, DIA, NASA, and military/intelligence branches of the government, so it is difficult to dismiss him out of hand as a crackpot or fraudster.

But beyond these non-physical encounters, there are reported UFO crash sites. Pasulka was taken to one with Professor Gary Nolan, an immunologist from Stanford who has emerged as one of the most credible mainstream scientists publicly researching UAPs. Nolan recovered “anomalous material” from the crash site that his analysis shows could not be produced by any known manufacturing or natural processes. His conclusion is that it shows signs of being engineered, but he knows of no way this could be done with current technologies.

This raises the possibility that our hard-and-fast distinction between the physical and spiritual may not adequately deal with the world around us. We may be dealing with something along the lines of technological longaevi. In other words, there may be beings in the liminal areas between the physical and spiritual, some of which produce high tech objects beyond our understanding.

And that brings us to Jacques Vallée, a French-American computer scientist, astrophysicist, venture capitalist, author, and one of the most rigorous, data driven researchers of UAPs. He’s been at it a long time—nearly 60 years.

Vallée notes that accounts of encounters with UFOs bear a striking resemblance to traditional reports of encounters with fairies from around the world; Pasulka noticed the same in medieval saints’ lives. Vallée believes that encounters with what we now label UAPs have been going on for a very long time but have been interpreted according to the current cultural worldview. Thus, in the past they were fairies; in recent years, they were space aliens; today they are transdimensional NHIs connected to AI and “downloads.”

Vallée also believes the beings are malevolent. He thinks they are out to deceive us by manipulating our perceptions and belief systems. The goal is to push us toward irrationality, dependence on them, and viewing them as saviors.

There are a range of other types of beings that may exist as well. I have personally dealt with poltergeist phenomena and what seemed to be a ghost (I am non-committal on what it actually was); I also had a decidedly unpleasant experience one night in a castle reputed to be haunted. I am forced to agree with Hamlet: “there are more things in heaven and on earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

But whatever beings may exist in the unseen or liminal realms, Scripture tells us we should not try to seek information (“downloads”) from them, not try to contact them, and in general as far as possible to have nothing to do with them. If we should encounter them, we should invoke the name of Jesus. In at least some cases, reports are that if we do this, they will just disappear. There are other ways of dealing with them covered in books on spiritual warfare, though these tend to assume you’re dealing with demons which may not actually be the case.

Should such an encounter happen, whatever the results, we need not fear anything we encounter from the unseen or liminal worlds. Christ is Lord of all things visible and invisible, and in Him we are spiritually protected. We must guard against deception, but as long as we do, we are secure in Him.

Share