“And the beasts of the waste places will come together with the jackals, and the evil spirits will be crying to one another, even the night-spirit will come and make her resting-place there.”
(Isa. 34:14, BBE)
After the last teaching, I feel a bit like Alice in Through the Looking-Glass (written by Lewis Carroll), when the unicorn says: “Well, now that we have seen each other, if you’ll believe in me, I’ll believe in you.”
There’s still a few matters to consider about the unicorn and what the Bible has to say about it, but for now it is perhaps first needed to take a general look at the symbolism of animals and their appearance in the spiritual realm (especially the composite animals that we for instance find in the apocalyptic books, especially that of Ezekiel, Daniel, and Revelations.) In the Bible, we find “a list of creatures, the greater part of which are matter-of-fact animals or birds … all these creatures are looked upon as more or less demonic” (International Standard Bible Encyclopaedia).
I thought it might be useful to integrate such a closer examination with personal testimonies in which the demonic spiritual realm was clearly at work, in particular experiences that I and believers (and non-believers) with whom I walk, have had.
But first: a disclaimer for those who might think that this testimony is not truthful. This is founded on the truth of 1 Cor. 2:14: “But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.”
In 2001, when God called me and my family from Mafikeng to Pretoria, He said that He would decide where our actual, physical home would be, as it was of prophetic importance. A week before we were supposed to move, God, in a supernatural manner, showed us the place where should live, close to Hartbeespoortdam. I received a personal task “to raise Me a house of prophets”.
A prophetic word came about the positioning of our home, and my mandate and the geographic positioning of Vlakplaas. At this point sangomas were living on the government land. For various reasons, I was the person placed in opposition to the individual in charge of the operation at Vlakplaas, a well-known politician and spiritual individual. The task of the sangomas was to function as prophets of another kingdom, and program their agenda for South Africa in the heavenlies. Apparently, they do so through blood sacrifice. In the Spirit, they must have been aware of my move, and thus, we suspected, they were doing everything in their power to remove me off the property. Furniture that moves around the house, children crying, men shouting, and women yelling seemed to indicate that everything was not as it seems.
Late one night I went to the bathroom, and when I walked in I became aware of a “stench and foul smell” (Joel 2:20, RSV), a pretty regular smell that occurs when demonic manifestation takes place in a room. The next moment I was squirted, out of the blue, with real, fresh blood, on my head, face, chest and arm. There was no visible entity in the small room that could have been the cause of what had just happened. I suspected that it was possibly demonic in nature, perhaps magic. I was so surprised by what happened that I quickly retreated and walked to the bedroom to show my wife what had happened. After I had washed off the blood and changed into clean clothes, I went back to the bathroom to see if I could find anything. Again, I was squirted with blood, but this time I expected it, and could largely sidestep the spurt. Most of the blood landed on the floor and on the toilet seat. At this point I was aggressively praying in tongues against an invisible power that was manifesting in the physical realm. There was still no visible entity in the room. When I returned to the bathroom a third time, later, nothing happened.
With all my experiences in the spiritual realm I had never experienced anything like this. At this time, I was sometimes consulting with a Nigerian pastor who was holding evangelical services in Atteridgeville, and he suspected that the entity in my bathroom was a vampire spirit that fed on real blood. He mentioned that these types of spirits for instance cause car accidents, to thus gain access to the victims’ blood. The goal of the spirit(s) had been to get me off the property. For me it was a rare but very real experience, and although I had always thought vampires were mere imaginary figures, I now had a reason to suspect that they might actually exist in the spiritual realm.
Interestingly enough, Prov. 30:15 points to a leech, the blood-sucking little animal found in water streams. Yet in Hebrew (‛ălūḳāh), the respected commentary on word connotations, Keil & Delitzsch Commentary on the Old Testament, says it can point to “a demoniacal spirit of the character of a vampire”. Jamieson, Fausset & Brown Commentary are more careful in their description: “supposed by some to be the vampire (a fabulous creature)”. The American Standard Version offers the footnote “vampire” to this word, which is most probably because of the fact that the Arabic Bible translates it as a very similar word, according to the ISBE: as “a ghoul (Arabic ghûl)”.
A few weeks later I received a strange sms, early one morning. It was from one of my spiritual sons, to whom I shall refer to as GM. It read as follows: “I had a dream in which I saw the following, as if it was a dictionary entry: GOUWS/VIRGINIA WOOLF”. He did not know what the dream meant, and he did not know about the existence of a writer named Virginia Woolf. While I was praying about this, I felt that I needed to take a specific guide about English literature from my book shelf, titled The Bloomsbury Guide to Literature. The Holy Spirit then pertinently pointed out two elements: Firstly, that Woolf had been part of the Bloomsbury-group, an intellectual grouping of artists who had played an important role in the establishing of the Romantic movement, a group interested in the creation of an ideal dream world to which they could escape. Secondly: this group formed around 1904, at this point exactly 100 years prior. I clearly experienced that God was making a link between the Bloomsbury group and a group within our faith network, of which one of my children was also part, a group of artists/academics/philosophers who, as a group, had already received great assignments from the Lord, about breaking destructive cycles in their generation. One of the collective characteristics that their generation had was a remnant of Romanticism, specifically the need to escape to an ideal dream world.
In conversation with the group one of the other young believers mentioned her own identification with the asceticism and melancholy of the Bloomsbury group, and pointed out that they had decided not to have children so that it would not steal from their creative time.
The dream that GM had had left me very unsettled, as almost 19 years before this – when my wife and I were expecting our first child, I suddenly felt that I should write a drama with the title Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? My research in the Potchefstroom library brought up much about the writer Virginia Woolf and her tragic history, but then I was led to Edward Albee’s drama with the same title as the one I had imagined. Needless to say, I disappointedly forgot the project. (In addition to this the drama was concerned with the death of a child, a subject about which I did not want to think about at that time.)
One of my intercessors and spiritual sons sms’ed me in this time, and mentioned that every time she prays for me, the name Ingrid Jonker comes up. That night, on the way home from a home church ministry session, I felt that I needed to listen to RSG (which could only be the Lord speaking), and they were playing a musical composition of Ingrid Jonker’s poem Ontvlugting, or Escape, which was a bizarre pointer to the way in which she would eventually commit suicide, by walking into the sea at Drieankerbaai, and drowning. The Holy Spirit immediately established a link between these two women who had died in the same manner. (Jonker is called the South African Woolf.) I immediately realized that it had been a water spirit that eventually dragged them into the water, the romanticized space of death.
On Wednesday morning 23 June 2004, one of my spiritual sons, whom I shall call JK here, died in a head-on collision. I had only met him about 4 months prior to his death, when his wife, a secretary at our company, organized a counselling session for him, with me. When he sat down I had a word of knowledge, and heard the term “The last Samurai” in my spirit. I mentioned this to him, and he started crying. He told me that a short while before our session he had seen the film The Last Samurai with his mother, and that he had cried throughout the screening. He had identified with something within it but he couldn’t figure out exactly what it was. Although he had been religious, he and I prayed together that day, and he recommitted his life to God. The change in his life was dramatic and radical. We dealt with a lot of things in deliverance, including his feelings of fear and inferiority, but we especially dealt with his problem concerning an idealized dream state in which he often lost himself.
My previous experience with someone who had lived in such an imaginary world, had been very traumatic for me as counsellor. It was a regular young man, a believer, who at first glance seemed to not have many problems. Yet he was immensely fearful, and I (and he) experienced that the Angel of Death had laid claim to him. At that point, he had already been the victim of a number of car accidents. After some time during which we had tried to figure out what the point of entry of the Enemy had been into his life, the Holy Spirit showed that he lived in an imaginary world. He was small in his own eyes, felt inferior, and thus he created all kinds of worlds in which he was successful, rich, popular. The Holy Spirit then provided the strategy of taking him to one of those worlds, and asking whether God is there. When I asked the question, the demons started dramatically manifesting. God was not in that imagined, romanticised world; it was a place where various evil manifestations could make themselves at home, “a habitation deserted and forsaken like the wilderness”, as Isa. 27:10 (ACV) refers to it.
The one spirit that then manifested that God helped me discern, was the spirit of the werewolf. According to Adam Clark’s Commentary on the Bible it is possibly one of these “disembodied spirits who haunt these desolate recesses”. This young man cried like a wolf, and crawled around on the ground, and tried to bite my ankles. I had to press him down on the floor while driving the demon from him. During the deliverance, the demon lifted up the man’s lower body (in the way that fish can lift their tails), and then brought it back forcefully to the ground. The man was in immense pain on account of this, as every time his body hit the floor his genitals were part of the impact. I realized that this spirit was focused on symbolically destroying his seed/descendants.
JK attended a camp and during the weekend seemed to have a good grasp on what his calling entails. He asked to no longer be called on by his birth name, but that he would now go by Neo, like the main character in the cult film The Matrix. What usually only happens later, at a phase-2 camp, namely finding your spiritual name, already happened to him at this point. He felt that God was calling him Dragon Slayer. Throughout the weekend there was suddenly resistance in the spiritual realm, against a principality that we could discern as the dragon. The rest of the story will be continued in the next teaching.
- Selah: Are believers subject to demonic working? Give a Biblical explanation.
- Reads: 37-45
Memorise: Gen. 41:38
