Did a Western Shaman See the Fall of Satan and His Angels?

 

Hell and heaven are both just on the other side of our material reality.

This is an update from an old post. I imagine a lot of my Christian friends wonder why on earth I blog about dark paranormal stuff like shamans and UAPs. There is method to my madness. I don’t pursue freaky lore for its own sake. My goal is to weave all aspects of the paranormal into a cohesive theology that coincides with the understanding of heaven and hell as portrayed in both Bible testaments. The purpose is not to use what I write as lurid clickbait, but to show that the image of the universe, both in the material and immaterial world, is consistent with biblical teachings. I hope to extend the Christian invitation to a glorious afterlife as well as to caution my readers, because the Bible does contain dire warnings about the consequences of living a careless, selfish life. If there’s a heaven, there’s a hell; if there’s a God, there’s a devil, and we ignore him at our peril.

 Michael Harner, Ph.D., author of The Way of the Shaman, 1990, learned the craft of shamanism from some of the remotest tribes on the globe. No adventurer ever trekked further or sought more diligently the hidden secrets of the spirit world. For Harner, the purpose of his craft is to help people who are bound and diseased by the intrusion of negative energy and spirits. It sounds positive, mystical, wise, exotic, perhaps more fun than religious dogma. He explains that a person needs positive power to combat these dark forces of nature. That power often comes from the spirit of a power animal, which has left the patient and has returned to its abode in Lower World. The shaman's job is to attain a shaman state of consciousness (SSC), with or without drugs, to leave the physical body, to combat or avoid the malicious spirits in the portal-tunnel (they may appear as fanged spiders or vipers, etc.), to recognize the appropriate spirit animal, to grab it securely so it can't bolt away, and bring it to the ailing participant.

 Wait. The shaman goes down to a place of spidery or fanged demons to find a spirit animal to empower the ailing human? And this is the spirit animal’s home. Hmmm.

 To be able to do so, of course, the shaman must have already gone to Lower World, via to the remote jungles of South America, or the deserts of the U.S., or some other place where master shamans hang out and acquire power through drugs like ayahuasca. Through dangerous rituals that carry a risk of madness or death, the shaman-to-be acquires various spirits called tsentsak to serve and protect him/her. The shaman must be imbued with power as he/she ministers to the ill. They may suck the illness out of the person and blow it into a pot. Can you imagine your internist trying to suck your kidney stone out and blowing it into a pot? He then breathes the power animal into the chest of the patient, restoring their own power and protection.

This is all done in darkness (John 1:5; Isa. 42:6-8), perhaps to better maintain the proper state of consciousness. It may sound loony to our modern ears, but the shamans and their clients declare that it works. It would not be surprising to me at all that it is effective in some cases, because the spirits that oversee all this activity are quite powerful. They are fallen angels, after all. Miracles can happen that have nothing to do with God.

 

In the pursuit of this activity, Harner assures his readers that the guardian spirits acquired will remain benevolent. Even though they may appear as a plant, human, or animal (or all three), their ability to shape-shift and ineffably affect the physical reality of our world will allegedly not be abused. The creed seems to be that they were placed in Lower World to be retrieved and pressed into service of living, mortal humans by a benevolent universe that knew we would need extra help now and then. Harner assures the reader that the shaman possesses the spirits; the spirits do not possess the shaman. They need to be exercised, says he, not exorcised (p. 68). We must hope that Harner is right, because if he is not, he is leading his disciples to hell and back with tagalong entities that certainly do want to possess them.

To prepare for his first encounter with the spirits of Lower World, Harner drank some ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic drug. He saw something “a huge fun house, a supernatural carnival of demons.” In the midst of it all, he saw a huge crocodilian head, out of which gushed a flood of water. Then he saw two boats approach. They joined into one, with a dragon-headed prow, rowed by humans with blue jay heads. He began to physically die and his soul essence began to be gathered to the boat. In spite of the lovely music he heard, giant reptilian creatures “told” him that since he was dying, he would be shown secrets (p. 3). He literally was dying. Had the antidote not been given in a short time, he’d be spending eternity with giant reptilian creatures. Perhaps there is a connection between those demons and the reptilians of UAP abduction narratives.

He saw the Earth as it was eons ago. Black specks rained down onto the primordial scene (p. 4). The specks were black, shiny entities with pterodactyl-like wings and bodies like whales. They had come to earth from outer space to escape their enemy. (Could their enemy be God?) They claimed to have created life to disguise their presence here. They claimed to be the masters of humanity, and since we were their servants, they were able to speak to Harner from within himself. When Harner related his vision to an old shaman, about how the bat-like animals claimed to be masters of the universe, the shaman smiled and said, “Oh, they're always saying that. But they are only the Masters of Outer Darkness,” (p. 7). In a parable, Jesus warned his listeners that those who reject Him and His teachings would be cast into outer darkness, a place of weeping and wailing, (Matt. 25:30).  

So the little bats were prone to exaggeration. Harner then presented the tale to two missionaries up the river from his location in the Peruvian Andes. They pointed him to two verses in the biblical Book of Revelation, chapter 12. I’m going to add a few more for context:

“And war broke out in heaven: Michael and his angels fought with the dragon; and the dragon and his angels fought, but they did not prevail, nor was a place found for them in heaven any longer. So the great dragon was cast out, that serpent of old, called the Devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world; he was cast to the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.” (7-9 NKJV)

“Now when the dragon saw that he had been cast to the earth, he persecuted the woman who gave birth to the male Child. But the woman was given two wings of a great eagle, that she might fly into the wilderness to her place, where is nourished for a time and times and half a time, from the presence of the serpent. So the serpent spewed water out of his mouth like a flood after the woman.” (13-15 NKJV)

This is a chapter in which a great dragon confronts a woman clothed with the sun. The Catholic Church claims that the woman is Mary, the mother of Jesus, but I see her as the Jewish spiritual Zion, out of which came the Christian church, the two global vehicles through which God brought His Son the Messiah into the world. The Manchild (Jesus Christ) is taken into the heavenlies to sit at God’s right hand. Harner only mentions verses 7-9 and 15 because they affirm exactly what he saw. But the fact is, the Bible chapter names the serpent as Satan. His tail swept away a third of the stars (former angels) and hurled them to the earth. There was a war in heaven resulting in Satan and his followers being cast to earth (7-9). Harner never mentions Christ or Michael the prince of angels in his book. Satan casts a flood of water out of his mouth (v. 15) to destroy the “woman” who gave birth to the child, but the earth thwarted Satan by helping her. Harner doesn’t mention that Satan then makes war on the rest of her seed, “those who keep the commandments of God and have the testimony about Jesus.” Not only is Satan shown as cast out of God’s heaven, he is described as an entity who “deceives the whole world.” Harner’s visions are amazing, but so is his inability to connect all the dots available. Like so many masters of the paranormal, he cherry picks the Bible and sees only what he wants to see.

When he was dying from the drug, he saw the demons that were in process of taking his soul. He pulled back because he realized that he didn't belong with them and they might be evil. Some other intrepid experimenter may not be able to whisper, “Medicine!” in time. The reality of a great, crocodilian beast as described in Revelation 12 became part of Harner’s new experiential knowledge, but the implication that Christ must then also exist didn’t seem to phase him. The suggestion that Satan may dwell in Lower World, which is where people who have terrifying NDEs go, that the bat creatures lie about who they are, that he even admits that they desire to dwell in human flesh, that he almost died and went to hell, etc....these dots are not connected by Harner. He seems to think that because he lived, he overcame these beasts and they will have no further hold on him.

I do respect the late Dr. Harner, and I hope he's in a good place. He was a seeker, an explorer, but we, gentle reader, should do ourselves a favor and connect the dots that Harner ignored. If his story is true, those who do NOT have the testimony of Jesus may spend eternity with the bat creatures in Lower World. There is far more to the immaterial universe than what he saw in Lowerworld.

This post can also be seen at https://medium.com/@janetkatherineapplebysmith/did-a-western-shaman-see-the-fall-of-satan-and-his-angels-2115d7c996d4