If you’ve read my blog series about The Secret Life of Wolf, or at least read Part Three (here), you’ll know that I have had many direct demonic attacks (visitations and dark supernatural encounters) since I was a child. Apart from the very first time it happened, which I talk about in the article, the very worst one, the most direct, the most traumatic, happened because of a book. Let me tell you the story and what it means for you, whether you’re a writer or a reader.
Several years ago now, a good friend of mine lent me a very well-known book. You’ve probably heard of it. It’s called “Eat, Pray, Love” by Elizabeth Gilbert. This Christian friend, whom I love and respect deeply, praised this book as an enjoyable account of an alternative way to visualise God and spirituality. That sounded good to me. So I started reading straight away.
It is the true story of Elizabeth Gilbert’s account to find herself after a disastrous end to a relationship. She travels the world and discovers the joy of food in Italy -“Eat” – and the practice of meditation in … I think it was India – “Pray”. And then, I assume she found new love somehow in perhaps another country – “Love”.
As I was reading it in bed each night before sleep, I was struck by just how connected to spirituality she was, in a way that very few talk about. She describes a direct connection to God. She didn’t agree with the Christian view of Jesus as the saviour and son of God, but she knew God was real and she had a connection to him. I started to open up and wonder if I needed to see things differently and that perhaps we followers of Jesus had boxed God in too much. I know we tend to do that. We make God small and neat and manageable, but were there genuine relationships with God out there in the form of spirituality? I knew about the New Age movement and I had friends who practised a kind of Universe worship where they might “ask the universe” for something. But those friends would never call it God.
Intrigued, I read through the “Eat” section of the book and kept asking God questions. And then I got to a point in the book where Elizabeth goes to India to learn meditation from the gurus. At one point, she is sitting alone inside a cave, ready to go deep into her meditation. She hasn’t fully released herself at this point to dive deep into this meditation and the promised supernatural that can happen when you do. She can’t quite commit, afraid of what might happen and what the guru-promised supernatural experience will feel like. This day, however, as she sits there alone in this cave, she goes deeper into the meditation. She lets go. Suddenly, the light around her glows blue, and the feeling of a snake starts to slide up her spine. She freaks out and stops. She’s not ready for this. And I freaked out and stopped too. I instantly thought, “I shouldn’t be reading this.” Everything about that description in the book felt like a doorway to the demonic, and, with my heart racing in fear, I knew it was time to stop reading.
That night, I woke up in the early hours of the morning. There was a blue glowing demon in my room towards the far corner of the bed, hissing at me like a snake. It had a long, distorted almost snake-like form, like one of those awful elongated giant inflatable “men” that sometimes businesses like car dealers use to indicate a sale – the ones that bow and flap in the air. I shot up into a sit, my heart pounding in fear, and turned on the light and it was gone. I had my answer. This book, this description of God, her relationship with God, was not God. Satan had just exposed himself to me.
Incidentally, when my son was about three, and we were living in a small apartment on the third floor in Melbourne with a “glorious” view of a car park and office high-rise, he used to sometimes point out the window down to a peep of a large park we could see when we turned our heads to the right and tell me that “The Funny Man” was watching him. I knew it scared him. I couldn’t see anything, but I knew about demonic activity enough to believe him. I knew he had nightmares and sometimes woke in terror. (And later in his life, he told his scripture teacher at school that he heard voices at night and it scared him. If you want to know how I dealt with that, I’ve written more below. See the footnote: **) I kept asking him to describe The Funny Man and he couldn’t. Then one day we were driving past a car dealership and they had one of those giant blow-up men – those bizarre long, skinny kind that reach several metres high and kind of flap and bow and bob and try to grab your attention – and he grew quite scared and told me that was “The Funny Man”. I thought it was quite odd that demons would appear in that form. And was Tristan really seeing a kind of blow-up balloon man in the park or was it appearing as something else and that’s the only way he could describe it? I was baffled about it until this incident about four years later with the blue-glowing snake demon. That night I saw this “Funny Man” for myself in the blue glow of the room. I mention this because sometimes it is the connections, the hints God leaves us, the way things have gone before, that confirm what we are seeing and help us know it’s very real.
And so I put the book back on the bookshelf down the other end of the house. I would not read it again. I wondered why Satan would give himself away like that. He could have had me fooled into thinking that all this time these kinds of relationships and connections to the spiritual were okay. But he had just exposed himself. And … he wasn’t done.
I have always been careful about what I watch and what I read because I know that some of these things can open up demonic activities. It’s never been big, dramatic demonic activities since the episodes as a child and teenager, but it might be footsteps where there shouldn’t be any, or voices outside my window at night – those kinds of things aimed to spook me. What happened next, however, was a whole other level.
Though I stopped reading that book, the following night, I woke up in the early hours of the morning to the worst attack of my life. My husband is a night owl and usually doesn’t come to bed before 2am so I was alone. I started to have a feeling in my dreams that something was really wrong. There was a deep, deep blackness in the atmosphere and a literal deep darkness. It felt like all the lights had been turned off. I usually sleep with lights burning somewhere so if I wake up I can see my room at a glance (a habit since the demonic attacks of childhood). This time I woke up and indeed the room was in deep darkness except for a whole lot of blue glowing demons down the side of my bed. They were speaking in harsh whispery sounds in a language I did not understand and they were pinning me down with their hands and one was reaching for my head. In all my years of attacks, apart from the first incident as a child, they have never been allowed to physically touch me. This time, it was different. I literally couldn’t move. I was trapped. I was completely pinned down, immobile. I couldn’t even free my arm up to turn on my lamp. I couldn’t see any of the lights from the room beyond mine that I always kept burning. I think they closed the door. I was in utter terror. It was as horrific as if I had woken up to find an intruder with an axe in his hand about to smash it down through my head.
I know I started screaming in terror, though I don’t remember it. There are certain things about that night that I have blocked out, I think. But I do remember that I must have screamed so loudly and for so long that Jeff, my husband, came running down from upstairs and I inadvertently woke my then-young son who sleeps through anything. They both came bursting into the room and the demons fled and the light flowed into the room from the room beyond the bedroom again.
I sat up and I shook violently for at least an hour, unable to speak. Literally unable to speak. I was in a deep, deep state of shock. Jeff sat next to me and just kept his hand on me while I shook. Tristan hovered, worried about what was happening to his mum. Jeff told me later he just prayed and prayed. Jeff already knew about the blue demon from the night before, and without me saying anything, I think he made the connection that something had happened again.
Jeff said we needed to get the book out of the house and I agreed. Had it been my book, I would have burned it there on the spot. But it was a loan. So Jeff walked it out of the house and put it in the letterbox.
The next day, we got in the car and drove the book back to our friend. I wanted to tell her about it but I was too traumatised. Thankfully, they had other visitors over and we left fairly quickly. I wouldn’t have made good company that day. For weeks after, I was in a state of shock and trauma, like I had been in a car accident, or like I really had woken up to the terror of an intruder with an axe and direct physical injuries. Everything was foggy, hazy, slow, like the long hours of jet lag. I barely spoke. I was barely present.
Once again, I wondered why Satan would expose himself like that but I called it out for what it was and told Satan that I saw him now. And then it occurred to me. I hadn’t read the book the second night when the worst attack came. The demons had a doorway simply because I had that book in the house. I know that objects can be doorways – a Buddha statue, for instance, but the physical copy of a book? And I had a revelation. Satan is not more powerful than God, and he’s not original. He cannot create; only God can create. Satan can only copy and steal. He’s the counterfeit in every way. (He’s the 666 to the true 777.) And so, what Satan can do with his weapons of war, i.e. the books he has his authors create, God can do with the books he has his people write. God told me then that if Satan’s demons can go physically with a physical book, how much more the Holy Spirit with a book God’s children write in partnership with him. The amazing thing is, people don’t even have to read it. They don’t even have to buy it. What if they even just walked past it in a library or bookshop?
There’s a story in the New Testament about the apostle Peter in Acts 5:15-16. So many miracles were pouring off him that people would come and bring their sick to even have Peter’s shadow pass over them. No words spoken, nothing read, nothing performed. Not even Peter himself. Just the shadow. Even just the proximity to something holy and consecrated to God can release the Holy Spirit. Why limit him to anything less?
We know that the Holy Spirit can change lives through our writing. We’ve probably been on the receiving end of having our lives changed through reading. But why limit him to someone having to read the words on the page? The very object itself can carry the blessing and presence.
This was turning in my brain for a long time after, and though I saw very clearly the counterfeit and so knew that the opposite is true and is the purer, stronger power – a hard and terrible lesson – I also knew it was wise to ask God to show me if I had it wrong. When I needed God to confirm this, he did.
I was speaking with a friend who had a really frightening encounter one night in his dreams that he felt was more than just a dream. At the time, he had just separated from his wife but her belongings were still in the house. He told me he had a dream he was standing in a cave and there was a glowing blue snake in there, hissing at him, malevolent. He was filled with fear at the sight of that snake and the blue light around him. He had a sword in his hand and he cried out, “Demon!” and leapt at the snake and cleaved it in half. He woke up with his heart pounding. After that, strange and terrible things started to happen in his house. Over dinner one night, he told me about the dream. I recognised immediately the scene he saw: the hissing snake, the cave and the blue glowing light, as well as the demon and fear. I asked him if he had a copy of “Eat, Pray, Love” in the house. I explained the scene in the book about the blue light, the snake, the cave, the meditation, and about what had happened to me. He said he didn’t have a copy, or hadn’t seen it, but that night he went home and looked through his wife’s packed boxes of things and found the book. He burnt the copy, and the problems stopped.
He hadn’t even read the book, or knew it was in his house, but the supernatural was able to ride the book, and I knew that even more so would the Holy Spirit go with physical copies of books that people owned or even had near them, or even went past in libraries. It was not the lesson Satan wanted me to learn, but I know that God did.
After that, the Holy Spirit showed me why Satan went so hard after physical copies of my books, stealing, destroying, trying to get a publisher to steal and hoard copies, for instance. He also showed me glimpses of how he went with the actual physical objects of my books, stories I might tell another time but I will tell this one event because I want you to fully understand how real this is.
A friend of mine gave the teenage son of a friend of hers copies of my Bloodline books as a present. Along with the books, she told him some of my story – the long struggle of publication, the spiritual warfare, the horrendous setbacks, and yet the constant hope that God would do as he promised with the books and the clear partnership I had with the Holy Spirit when I wrote them and the way I always, ALWAYS got back up from one more knock-down when God asked me to. She knew the boy was struggling and was depressed, and she hoped it would inspire him. That boy loved those books so much and later he told my friend that he had been suicidal until he read them. He clutched those books to his chest as he talked to her and said, “If she can hold on and write books like this, then I can too.” He told her that it had given him so much hope and even just physically holding them to his chest made a difference to him. My friend told me he clutched those books like you would clutch a lifesaver when you were drowning.
When you partner with the Holy Spirit to write your book, you’re not just hoping a few keywords break through to the reader and change them. The Holy Spirit goes physically with that book, even if the person never reads it. For that reason, more than ever, the world needs you to write your book and use your gifts. On the flip side, more than ever, the world needs you to be careful what you read and what you partner with. Great power flows in and out of words. I could write whole articles on this topic and not just how I know from a biblical point of view, but even how science is showing this is true.
I do know that our words are our authority and weapon against Satan – the sword of truth, the power of life and death in the tongue. And I know that the Eastern practice of meditation is about emptying your mind and silencing your tongue, because that allows Satan to come right in like it did for Elizabeth Gilbert. So much so, that her writing about it allowed demons to ride her book and then specifically attack me and later my friend. And how many others opened themselves to the demonic influence, I wonder. There’s a reason why it became the bestseller it did.
** After the scripture teacher at school informed me of what Tristan had confessed, I told her I knew what it was and I would deal with it. That night, after Tristan had gone to bed, I stood in the doorway of my bedroom facing outward. From there I could see all the way down the house including to Tristan’s bedroom door. I spoke out loud and clearly. I said I was Tristan’s mother, and a child of the King of Kings, saved and covered by the blood of Jesus, and had God-given authority over my son. And so if the demons wanted to come at my son, they would have to go through me first, but they couldn’t get through Jesus in me. And so the voices and the trauma and nightmares stopped. And I’m guessing, so did The Funny Man. In fact, Tristan has no memory now of any of this happening, for which I am grateful because I know what the childhood memories and traumas of demonic things did to me.
About the Author: Lisa Saul
